The Weekly’s South Side Community Resource Guide is regularly updated online with new information about mutual aid groups and other community-based sources of help and information. New aid initiatives are springing up weekly; a selected list is included below. Visit southsideweekly. com/covid-19-south-side-communityresource-guide for more. Black Lives Matter is coordinating "Care Not Cops" a citywide mutual aid effort to get supplies to Black neighborhoods in crisis. If you need supplies, if you can donate supplies, or if you want to volunteer to the effort, email blmchisupplies@gmail.com or call (872) 205-6597. Brave Space Alliance, a Black-led, transled LBGTQ center, is partnering with the Trans Liberation Collective to create a COVID-19 Relief Fund for trans, nonbinary, and intersex people in the Chicagoland area, particularly the South and West Sides, facing financial hardship. The fund will distribute payments of up to $200 per person. You can apply at bit. ly/transrelieffund or donate to the fund at actionnetwork.org/fundraising/trans-relieffund or venmo.com/BraveSpace-Alliance. Brown People for Black Power Rapid Response is a network of 500 Latinx people who are available to do safety escorting, grocery delivery, dog walking, and safety passage of any sort for Black residents. Requests can be made at brownaid4blm@ gmail.com and (773) 217-8533. Black and Pink: Chicago, “an open family of LGBTQ prisoners and ‘free world’ allies who support each other,” is raising commissary funds to donate to its incarcerated community—more than 800 members in Illinois—to help them buy soap and other necessities. You can donate by sending funds to Black and Pink: Chicago’s PayPal, blackandpinkchicago@gmail.com, with a note that says “commissary.”
The Chicago COVID-19 Hardship and Help Page is a platform created by organizers Kelly Hayes and Delia Galindo to provide an easy way for those financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to ask for money and for those less impacted to donate. The list is not vetted. See tranformativespaces.org.
The COVID-19 Immigrant Family Support Project is a fund by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) to provide direct assistance to immigrants who are struggling as a result of coronavirus, especially the undocumented. Text "COVIDIL" to 52886 for more information in English and Spanish.
The annual Chicago Dyke March is providing emergency assistance to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) who live in Chicago and are financially impacted by the pandemic. People can donate to the fund, that prioritizes queer, trans, intersex, disabled, and undocumented BIPOC, at https://www.gofundme.com/f/ cdmc-covid19-relief-fund.
The Gage Park Latinx Council, in concert with organizers from Pilsen and Archer Heights, has launched a mutual aid fund initiative to raise funds for undocumented families living on the Southwest Side. The link to donate is at gofundme.com/f/ mutualaidsw; applications are currently closed but the group says they've identified over 2500 families in need and raised over $60,000 so far.
Chicago Hospitality Employee Relief Guide is maintaining a crowdsourced spreadsheet of fundraisers and gift-card buying opportunities for employees of more than six hundred local businesses, including Kusanya Cafe and Birrieria Zaragoza. See facebook.com/chihospitalityemployeerelief/. The Disability Culture Crip & Ally Care Exchange is making and distributing cloth masks for people with disabilities and their personal care assistants. To request a mask or to donate money to the cause contact cripallycareexchange@gmail.com. More information can be found on their Facebook page @DisabilityCultureCACE. Flood’s Hall, a Hyde Park volunteer-run nonprofit, has launched a zero-interest, emergency loan program in response to COVID-19. “The pandemic caught us all by surprise, and the reality is that most Americans have trouble covering an unexpected expense of $400,” said cofounder Natalie Wright. “Government money can be slow-moving and involve complicated red tape—our community needs to fund itself now.” The group aims to provide short-term, interest-free loans of $200–$400 to address immediate needs and protect neighbors from predatory lenders. They’ve given out thirty-three loans totaling $9,500 so far. See floodshall.org/emergencyloan to request or sponsor a loan. For the People Artists Collective is offering microgrants for artists and freelancers of color. Applications are currently closed but per the website, "In our first round of emergency microgrants, we were able to redistribute $10,369 dollars to forty-nine BIPOC artists in Illinois, and we are set to distribute close to $11,000 more in our second round." See forthepeoplecollective. org.
ILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA
In partnership with Urban Pilón, Fresher Together, LVEJO, and Amor y Sofrito, Getting Grown Collective is providing free hot meals to fifty Englewood, Little Village, and South Chicago families every week. Food is sourced from community gardens and urban farms on the South Side to support Black- and Brown-led agriculture. For more information, to donate, or to request meals visit gettinggrowncollective. com/farmfoodfamilias. Greater Bridgeport Mutual Aid is seeking volunteers and donations to help support residents of Bridgeport, Canaryville, Armour Square, and Chinatown. To volunteer or to request aid see gbmachicago.org The Illinois Prison Project has created a form where incarcerated people’s loved ones who are willing to have them return to their homes can submit information about their loved one and their living situation to be shared with the Illinois Department of Corrections and possibly other organizations and government agencies. The objective is to help ensure that if a possibility that a person could be released as part of efforts to stop COVID-19 from spreading in prisons arises, IDOC will know an incarcerated person has somewhere to go. The Illinois Prison Project cautions that most people will not be released from prison, and even if some people do have the opportunity for release, there are likely to be other limitations in addition to housing. The organization is also maintaining a form for people who might be willing to host a returning citizen they do not know. Find out more at illinoisprisonproject.org. I Grow Chicago, a nonprofit that works with Englewood residents to build community and provide a wide range of healing and
food access-related resources, is providing care packages and virtual support to elders and families in its area, including food and cleaning supplies, check-in calls, and homework help. They’re seeking donations and supplies to keep the effort going. Residents from Back of the Yards launched a mutual aid effort for street vendors citywide through the non-profit program Increase the Peace. The fund, which prioritizes undocumented food vendors who are not eligible for government COVID-19related aid, is accepting donations through a GoFundMe at gofundme.com/f/covid19relief-for-street-vendors and has raised $30,000. Applications for the fund are available online in English and Spanish. The Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization is using a $25,000 grant from the Chicago Community Trust to pack and distribute care packages of food and cleaning supplies to families in their service area. For more information about how to get on the list contact KOCO at (773) 548-7500 or info@kocoonline.org; to make a contribution to the organization click the donate button on their website at kocoonline.org. The McKinley Park Coronavirus Mutual Support Network is coordinating mutual aid efforts aimed at providing food, medication, and other assistance to residents in need in that neighborhood. To request assistance call (312) 772-4806, email mckinleyparkcovid19@gmail.com, or fill out the form at tinyurl.com/tbym33p. To volunteer goods or labor hit up the same email address, or fill out a separate form at tinyurl.com/un6s8gf. Pilsen Solidarity Network is a mutual aid collective comprised of Pilsen en Defensa, Femme Defensa, and other autonomous people from, of, and around Pilsen responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The group is currently accepting requests for grocery and supply deliveries, prescription pick ups, and FedEx drops, with the option of financial support for the cost raised from donations. If you would like to volunteer or you run a restaurant that can donate goods, email pilsensn@gmail.com. To donate money go to gofundme.com/f/pilsenvencera-covid19.
SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds. Volume 7, Issue 19 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editors Martha Bayne Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors Julia Aizuss, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Emeline Posner, Adam Przybyl, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editor Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Nature Editor Sam Joyce Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Sarah Fineman Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan, Joshua Falk, Lucia Geng, Carly Graf, Robin Vaughan, Jocelyn Vega, Tammy Xu, Jade Yan Staff Writer
AV Benford
Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Grace Asiegbu, Arabella Breck, Maya Holt Director of Fact Checking: Tammy Xu Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Sam Joyce, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Charmaine Runes Visuals Editor Mell Montezuma Deputy Visuals Editors Siena Fite, Sofie Lie, Shane Tolentino Photo Editor Keeley Parenteau Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Katherine Hill Layout Editors Haley Tweedell, Davon Clark Webmaster Managing Director
Pat Sier Jason Schumer
The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com
Cover Photography by Anthony Nguyen
IN CHICAGO When South Side Weekly editors saw the first reports of George Floyd's murder coming out of Minneapolis, it shook us, and it gave us flashbacks to the police coverup of Laquan McDonald's killing and the repeated trampling of Black bodies that Americans are especially privy to in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Being from Chicago also means empathizing with Black people and people of color in other Midwestern cities who are in the struggle. As journalists, our primary obligation is to the communities we report in and for. These communities, and Black and Brown people in particular, have historically been, and continue to be, targets of police violence and repression. For this issue, the Weekly put out a call for first-person accounts from that weekend, and we are sharing some of them as a means of documenting the small window of time when an otherwise peaceful protest in downtown Chicago escalated rapidly into violence, between about 4pm and 7pm Saturday, May 30. Our colleagues at the Invisible Institute are also collecting video and photographic evidence of police use of batons on protesters that day, and at other moments in the days that followed. As the protests quiet, for now, Minneapolis has banned the use of police chokeholds and a majority of city council members announced their plans to disband the police department, while Los Angeles’ city council proposed reducing LAPD’s $1.8 billion operating budget. In Chicago, Black and Latinx aldermen are considering the creation of a “Chicago Citizens of African Descent Reparations Commission” made up of 16 members that would include Mayor Lori Lightfoot and ten members of the public. But thousands of protesters, activists, and some Democratic Socialist city council members are taking it further and are calling on the mayor to #DefundCPD. In an era of widespread surveillance, police and state security forces use photographs to identify and prosecute activists. So in an effort to balance the public’s need for information against the potential for doing harm to those struggling for justice, the Weekly has chosen to conceal the faces of protesters in photos of the recent demonstrations against police brutality. We believe this decision adheres to ethics guidelines established by the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Photographers Association.
IN THIS ISSUE what happened may
30?
A timeline of escalating conflict in downtown Chicago martha bayne and jason schumer.................4 videos show an aggressive police response to
Chicago
protest
andrew fan.....................................................10 in bridgeport, past and present live side by side
Sightings of armed vigilantism highlight the neighborhood’s history and prompt questions about safety rachel kim......................................................11 “i
wanted to do something for my neighborhood”
A young resident takes the plunge into activism amid chaos grace asiegbu..................................................15 “there’s feeling”
no words to describe how most of us are
Interview with Englewood activist Asiaha Butler martha bayne..................................................16 sestina for the looting of the black body
Poem and photo essay av benford.......................................................18 city cited a school for feeding protesters
The Chicago Freedom School opened its doors to people who were trapped in the Loop after George Floyd protests jim daley and kiran misra............................20 census spotlight: centers for new horizons
In the 2010 census, nearly a million kids were not counted emeline posner...............................................23 abandoned communities arrange black/brown truce
Chicago residents quell racial divide in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests jacqueline serrato.........................................24 tracing the roots of torture
A collection of open letters details Chicago’s history of police torture michelle gan..................................................26 keeping art alive during a pandemic
“Being in a pandemic amplifies all those things that have already existed before.” walter li and yiwen lu.................................30 JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3
JUSTICE
What happened May 30?
ANTHONY NGUYEN
A document of escalating conflict in downtown Chicago BY MARTHA BAYNE AND JASON SCHUMER
Content warning: Discussion and images of police violence.
O
n May 30, when the car caravans that started at the Cook County Jail and at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bronzeville met up at 2pm with the rally going on at Federal Plaza, it was clear that this was going to be big. Thousands of people marched through the Loop, up Lake Shore Drive, and down Michigan Avenue that day, in protest of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, and the many killings of Black people by police that preceded it. For more than seven hours on Saturday, social media feeds were flooded with images of protesters confronting Chicago police officers, and of police officers using what many participants and observers described as excessive, unwarranted force to push them back. Taken in concert with images of stores along Michigan Avenue being smashed and looted and police vehicles vandalized and burning, it was, said witnesses both on the scene and watching from afar, chaos. Once the Loop was on lockdown, looting and vandalism spilled out into the neighborhoods on Sunday, May 31, and continued into Monday, devastating communities on the South and West Sides. Reports have swirled of white supremacists marching in Bridgeport, and of violent 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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conflict between Black and Latinx residents in Little Village, Pilsen, and Humboldt Park. By Monday afternoon, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had declared Cook County (along with DuPage, Will, Kane, Kendall, and four downstate counties) a disaster area, and called in the National Guard. Meanwhile, public protests against police brutality and racism have swelled all over the city, drawing crowds as large as 20,000. On May 30, there were 494 arrests citywide, including for disorderly conduct (373), civil unrest (414), looting (28), and firearms (16). Eighty-five officers reported being injured on duty that day. And between May 29 and June 4 more than 250 complaints were filed against CPD with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. What happened that Saturday? The Weekly put out a call for first-person accounts from that weekend, with the aim of establishing a coherent timeline of events. Among the more than fifty testimonials we’ve received, the majority focus on a small window of time when an otherwise peaceful protest escalated rapidly into violence, between about 4pm and 7pm on the Wabash bridge and around the Trump International Hotel and Tower, the Wrigley Building, and the intersection of State and Kinzie. Many protesters in this area report being struck with batons, shoved to the ground, or otherwise physically attacked. A video shot
just after 4pm near State and Kinzie shows a peaceful standoff between a police line and protesters escalate drastically when officers rush toward multiple protesters for no clear reason. Other CPD officers rush toward this incident; the crowd appears to panic. A woman screams. A man can be heard asking, “Why’d y’all do this? Why’d y’all hit us?” And then, mayhem. Confusion, panic, and conflicts were amplified by the raising of the bridges over the Chicago River, starting with the Michigan Avenue bridge. When Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a 9pm curfew at 8:25pm, and CTA service to the Loop was shut down, anyone still downtown was effectively trapped. In the evening of May 30, kettling tactics—in which police cordons are deployed to block off streets and force large groups of people gathered into a confined area—appear to have been employed in Chicago, as they have been in New York City, Washington DC, and elsewhere. It is a strategy that makes it impossible to leave, should one want to, and is designed to facilitate mass arrests—and inevitably leads to a ratcheting up of tensions. (In 2012, the city settled a $6.2 million class action lawsuit brought by the 900 or so people detained by kettling during a 2003 protest against the Iraq War.)
There is still much to be unearthed about why this protest broke the way it did, and more stories and more facts to come to light. For example: why this particular location? As Trina Trill noted in her interview, “I think Donald Trump symbolizes what robbing Black and brown folks in this country looks like.” But what’s known right now is this: Mayor Lightfoot and CPD Superintendent David Brown have both publicly praised the “restraint” of the police department during the protests. But such commendation is sharply at odds with the testimonials, video, and photographs collected by the Weekly and our colleagues at the Invisible Institute. In the pages that follow, we offer a timeline of one brief moment in an ongoing, unspooling, infinitely complicated narrative, drawing on first-person accounts, social media postings, and publicly available data. (In the instances when speakers wished to remain anonymous, we respected that wish, though their identities are known to the Weekly.) In the weeks to come, we seek to collect more first-person accounts of other key incidents in this remarkable moment of Chicago’s history. Martha Bayne is a managing editor of the Weekly. She last wrote about how food pantries are adapting to COVID-19. Jason Schumer is managing director of the Weekly.
JUSTICE
4:07pm: State & Kinzie “I don't know if he’s a sergeant but you see one of the guys in the white shirts go back behind the line and start pointing at the crowd, and then you see them form [another line] a bit behind and that's when, unprovoked, they expanded their line out about ten-fifteen feet. That’s when they hit us all with batons. They first pressed them, with both ends in each hand. But after they first struck the crowd, then they pulled them out and started swinging them. The second officer that I made contact with actually swung his baton and hit me. The first one pushed me with it, checked me in the chest, and the other one swung it and hit my arm as I was biking away. And then they just kind of stood there and held a new line that was just a little bit further out. And people were really upset. They arrested a few people and were dragging them. One of the white-shirted officers threw one of their bikes behind the line. It was primarily peaceful until they expanded the line that they created around the Trump Tower. It was under control where I was. I don't know what was happening everywhere else but when they started moving forward, and you see people getting brutalized ... In those moments, you see people go from preaching peace and ‘don't touch the police’ and you see them start pushing the police and start trying to hold the line. But up until the beatings started, where I was, people were dispersing. It wasn't in the instant that the police said but people were dispersing and the crowd was diminishing. As soon as you start hearing these bangs and people are running and you're watching the police assault these people, you just can see other people start to break with the protest, and it becomes the riot.” – Andrew Brasher Watch the video of this incident: sswk.ly/protest-4 (content warning: video of police violence)
4:30 PM: MICHIGAN AVE BRIDGE IS RAISED
4:51pm: Wabash Bridge “Everything I saw was where I stood and held the line with other protestors on the southbound side of the Wabash bridge where we met the line of cops in riot gear. There was one moment where protestors attempted to put space (after multiple unprovoked attacks by the police line) between us and them with a metal barrier, being very careful to not hit anyone, especially police, with the barrier, only for an officer to yank the barrier, hitting multiple protestors in the head and instigating a melee.” – Robert Ivaniszyn II Watch the video of this incident: sswk.ly/protest-3 (content warning: video of police violence)
TEDDY WACHHOLZ
JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
JUSTICE
5:00PM: DEARBORN BRIDGE IS RAISED
5:10PM: LASALLE BRIDGE IS RAISED
5:30pm: Wabash Bridge “We marched around the Loop, eventually making our way near Trump Tower, where we encountered a police line. The demonstrations up until this point were without incident beyond a few instances of graffiti and minor vandalism which would be impossible to control in a crowd that large. I was not at the front at this point but it is my understanding that protesters wished to continue marching peacefully, but the police, with no explanation, refused to allow us to proceed. Several people were arrested before I arrived. I arrived at the Wabash bridge to find a line of police in riot gear guarding Trump Tower and the Magnificent Mile, refusing to let protesters pass. Again, no order to disperse had been given at this point. Protesters formed several layers of lines, interlocking their arms, opposite the police. Without warning as far as I heard, the police started to advance onto the bridge. When you're on the front line, you have nowhere to go if the police begin to advance, and so people are pushed back forward, again with their arms interlocked, not posing a threat. The police regardless treat this as violence and respond with extreme force, shoving and striking protesters with batons. [Ed. note: Read an analysis of CPD’s baton use during the protests by the Invisible Institute, an editorial partner of the Weekly, on page 10.] One young man, probably around my age, had his hands up when he was thrown to the ground and struck on the head. Several of his friends had to drag him through the crowd away from the police. We helped administer first aid, as he had two heavily bleeding cuts on his face, on either side of his right eye. At this point things calmed down intermittently. The cops had shut off the end of the bridge and continued to advance, but less frequently. This is when the order to disperse was finally given, over four hours after the protest began. The police had given the order to leave the area, but everywhere we looked the streets were blocked by police. It seems their tactic had been to break off the protest early into smaller groups and corner them in places where there was only one way out before the police instigated any violence. And I can tell you this for sure, at least from what I saw, that there was absolutely no rioting until the police arrived and escalated the situation. We had to walk several blocks to get around the police lines, and then the CTA and the roads had been closed off so the only option to leave the area was to walk four blocks home.” – Deanna (a pseudonym)
6:00pm: Wabash Bridge “The police started going move, move, move, and they started pushing us, and they started using their baton to hurt us. There were police officers who pulled out their batons and just started shoving them instead of having them flat against their chest. They started poking us like in a stabbing motion with their batons and hitting people in the ribs. They started grabbing people by their hoodies and yanking them across the line so that they could get arrested. There was some head butt action that was happening. It was incredibly scary. Honestly, it felt as if they were trying to incite a stampede because there were hundreds of people out there, and there was no way that they weren't communicating with the people in the middle. It was literally like they were squishing hundreds of people on one end, so that the rest of the people could run and topple over one another, or just generally get hurt. It was pretty scary.” – Trina Trill (a pseudonym)
6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2020
6:00pm: Wrigley Building “This is where things became more intense. They had raised the bridge so we were stopped at the Wrigley building. They began taunting protestors. Police on horses arrived … A group of officers were caught behind a barricade of protestors, but we realized that they were a distraction so the other officers could block us in more from the north side of Michigan Ave. … I saw white people jump to the front line and block black people from the reach of the police. I saw police officers shove protestors aggressively, I saw police officers with blood on their sleeves and protestors with blood coming out of their heads. We had to move again and walk out with our hands up chanting “Hand up, Don’t shoot” to ensure the officers knew we weren’t a threat. This was a peaceful protest until the police arrived in their riot gear and aggressive attitudes. After the bridges were raised and they cut protestors off from each other, the only people who were violent were these masked, hooded instigators and the police handled us like we were destroying the entire city by simply marching.” – Sean Anthony Garcia-Kalusa Excerpted from Twitter with permission. Read their full thread at sswk.ly/twitter-1
6:00pm: Wabash Bridge “We were peacefully holding our ground, not advancing, when CPD approached with batons out and started pushing them into our throats, smashing people in the face with their shields. I had my hands up already and tried to maneuver a baton out of my throat so I could breathe, and was then snatched by an officer who had his name and badge covered. He said ‘get this bitch’ and multiple officers grabbed me so forcefully I have handprint bruises still (as of Wednesday). In the scuffle (people behind me were trying to pull me back into the protest crowd), the main officer pulled my book bag open and started dumping items. Among them was my Canon 5D MK IV, a 28mm lens, and a 70-200mm lens. He grabbed them and threw them on the ground behind me. I was then thrown face down and zip-tie-handcuffed, then dragged to sit in front of Trump Tower.” – Brittany Sowacke
6:00PM: ALL TRAINS IN THE LOOP ARE SUSPENDED
6:15pm: State and Kinzie “It got pretty aggressive about 6:10 or 6:15. There were a lot of thrown objects and a lot of the police just … were not moving together in an organized way. It was a bit of a free for all. Then, at 6:15, two CPD cars, one of them was a cruiser and one was an SUV, drove through the crowd that was on State. There's a peaceful protest congregation and for whatever reason, those two CPD cars just drove right through the crowd. … At that time before the cars came through, it was loud but peaceful. You can see in the videos that small objects were thrown. Maybe a couple of water bottles, a traffic cone. And as a result of those small objects being thrown, some police officers started just charging the protesters. Again, it did not seem organized. It did not seem like these officers had control over their actions or their emotions and they tackled some protesters and they beat some protesters with a baton. I couldn't see what it was that they were reacting to. I don't know if they were doing it indiscriminately, or if they were tackling or beating somebody who had thrown an object, or somebody who they thought threw an object, but pretty quickly a lot of people that were
JUSTICE
"It seems their tactic had been to break off the protest early into smaller groups and corner them in places where there was only one way out before the police instigated any violence." JOSHE F6
standing right next to you one minute prior were on the ground being violently tackled, restrained, and beaten by police officers.” – Steven Arroyo Watch the video of this incident: sswk.ly/protest-1 (content warning: video of police violence)
6:15pm State and Kinzie “On State Street is where I personally witnessed police escalation and violence. That is where I witnessed the cop car driving through protesters because they would not move out of the way for the cop car to get through the crowd. So basically at around 6:15 to 6:30, we were stopped there by a line of police and the crowd that had gotten stopped right after we got off Lake Shore had somehow come back around and joined together again. The police removed their line that was blocking that crowd and continued more towards State Street.
We weren't receiving any direction but we were entirely blocked in by the police and a lot of us were asking them where we should go and we were met with blank faces from the cops. So, my friend who I was with, since we are white, we decided to stick around and film and make sure everything was okay. That is the time that I took the video of Officer Birdsong going after a protester. The protestor, from everything I saw was passionate and yelling but he was not being violent at all. And I was also passionate and yelling standing directly next to him (he was Black) and Officer Birdsong went after him with a baton twice. Both times being pulled off by the other cop. And then the second time, it escalated to a degree that somebody who is obviously in charge of him came over and pushed him and gave the direction to go back behind the line” – Anonymous Watch the video of this incident: sswk.ly/protest-2 (content warning: video of police violence)
JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
6:20pm: Wrigley Building “When the crowd first kind of broke into that police line the police were swinging their billy clubs pretty wildly. There wasn't really any order, it was just people trying to run through and people trying to push back and that was a lot more confrontational. And then once the line forms, people kind of linked up and stopped directly confronting the police, and were just trying to resist the police from moving us backwards. At which point the police continued to hit us with batons. I don't think I was hit, but one of my roommates was hit a lot and had pretty large bruises from police batons on their legs. I actually had my back to the police—I wasn't facing them, I was turned away—and [one] started shoving really, really hard. My glasses fell off and I ended up falling down to the ground, and then I just felt maybe two or three pairs of hands come out and grab me and grab my backpack and drag me out of the crowd. They dragged my roommate as well. They pulled us both out of the crowd behind the police line and … they kind of threw us down on our stomachs, and they held us there for a minute. I thought we were going to get arrested at that point but they just held us there and then said, “OK get out of here. Go back to the protest,” in so many words. We make our way back to the police line where they're still confronting the protesters, but at this point the police have formed a bike wall between us and the protest crowd. And from the other end there's like state riot police and CPD riot police kind of flooding in, so essentially there's no way for us to get back into the crowd. So I start yelling like, “What do you want me to do? Where am I supposed to go? How do we get back in here? You told me to go back in the crowd!” I was probably a little bit more belligerent than that in the moment but I wasn't being aggressive or anything, I was just worked up and it was very chaotic so I was, you know, yelling. And I hear another police officer shout, “OK grab her,” and I feel another pair of hands on my back and they swing me around and throw me down on my stomach, and that's when I was actually arrested. I believe that was about 6:20-6:30 p.m.” – Anonymous
6:30PM: ALL BUSES IN THE LOOP ARE SUSPENDED
trying to resist the police from moving us backwards. At which point the police continued to hit us with batons. I don't think I was hit, but one of my roommates was hit a lot and had pretty large bruises from police batons on their legs. I actually had my back to the police—I wasn't facing them, I was turned away—and [one] started shoving really, really hard. My glasses fell off and I ended up falling down to the ground, and then I just felt maybe two or three pairs of hands come out and grab me and grab my backpack and drag me out of the crowd. They dragged my roommate as well. They pulled us both out of the crowd behind the police line and … they kind of threw us down on our stomachs, and they held us there for a minute. I thought we were going to get arrested at that point but they just held us there and then said, “OK get out of here. Go back to the protest,” in so many words. We make our way back to the police line where they're still confronting the protesters, but at this point the police have formed a bike wall between us and the protest crowd. And from the other end there's like state riot police and CPD riot police kind of flooding in, so essentially there's no way for us to get back into the crowd. So I start yelling like, “What do you want me to do? Where am I supposed to go? How do we get back in here? You told me to go back in the crowd!” I was probably a little bit more belligerent than that in the moment but I wasn't being aggressive or anything, I was just worked up and it was very chaotic so I was, you know, yelling. And I hear another police officer shout, “OK grab her,” and I feel another pair of hands on my back and they swing me around and throw me down on my stomach, and that's when I was actually arrested. I believe that was about 6:20-6:30 p.m.”—Anonymous
7:00pm: Illinois and Wabash “We started going towards the protests. And we got down to Illinois and Wabash, something along there. And there were cops coming down north of us on Wabash, and it looked like they were starting to kettle the protesters. They started shouting, and so everyone scattered at that point. I don't know what happened afterwards. It looked like they were going to end up being kettled, and that was going to be bad news for everyone involved but I didn’t witness that. There were a lot of cops not wearing face masks and I would call that escalation in this context. One thing I was very impressed by is that everyone in the entire protest was wearing face masks but the cops weren't.” – Peter Meyer Reimer
7:00pm: Illinois and State “I would say that the majority of the protest was very peaceful. Less than twenty percent of people were instigating some sort of reaction from the cops, and any time someone did the cops started charging toward the entire group (and it was usually for petty reasons, frankly, like throwing a half empty bottle of water). The cops were acting increasingly aggressive as the day carried on, and refused to ever engage/respond to any of the protesters' questions. They started circling us from all sides of the intersection at Hubbard/Illinois/Grand and State around ~7pm after having closed off every single bridge except the one on Wabash. Eerie sight. While there was definitely some looting going on, any fear I felt during the day stemmed from police instigation/reaction, rather than any of the looting that was happening on the side.” – Mathilde Geannopulos
7:00pm: Wrigley Building
7:00pm: Trump Hotel “When the crowd first kind of broke into that police line the police were swinging their billy clubs pretty wildly. There wasn't really any order, it was just people trying to run through and people trying to push back and that was a lot more confrontational. And then once the line forms, people kind of linked up and stopped directly confronting the police, and were just
“People started throwing things, but it wasn't really violent per se. There was no fire, there was no looting. We'd seen graffiti and stuff as we were walking down the mag mile, but it was activism focused. It was combative because activism is combative by nature, but it wasn't hateful. But that's when things started getting scary. People started throwing things and the police response was very ... it felt serious and it felt … interjectory. They had lined up against the buildings, like facing out towards us, and I immediately realized that their goal wasn't to make sure we were safe or anything like that, but just to protect the buildings. At that point, no one was interested in looting. No one was interested in property destruction, but seeing the police prize this random building over the lives of people protesting and the lives they are protesting for, it made you upset. We were standing facing the line of police against the building and then some police officers on bikes came in behind us to try to break the line that was facing the police. That was when I first saw, not violence from the police, but they
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were shoving people. They were moving people out of the way, and at that point, my group decided to leave, because that was a turning point. “Every street either had a pretty heavy police presence or the bridges were up and closer east, they would have bigger groups of police and further west they would just have the bridges up. We weren't super panicked about getting out until we got further and further and further west and still couldn't find a way back south across the river. We eventually got to Adams and that was the first bridge we found that was down. … We were able to cross Adams at about 7:30. It was 7:20 specifically, I remember I put it on Snapchat for anyone who was trying to get out. But as we came over the bridge, they had technicians, people in the yellow vests who were . operating the bridges, walking up toward the bridge saying that they wanted the bridge to close. And I heard one of the guys speculating, they want to keep the protesters there. So that was like the first indication that they were intentionally shutting people in.” – Lucy
7:13PM: WABASH BRIDGE IS CLEARED AND RAISED 8:20PM: MAYOR LIGHTFOOT ISSUES 9:00PM6:00AM CURFEW JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
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Videos show an aggressive police response to May 30 protest An analysis by the Invisible Institute finds multiple likely violations of CPD’s new use of force policy BY ANDREW FAN
Content warning: Discussion and images of police violence
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fter clashes between protesters and police on Saturday, May 30, the attention of the city’s politicians and media quickly focused on images of burning CPD cars and damaged businesses. Chicago’s new police superintendent, David Brown, praised his officers in the aftermath, saying, "Chicago police officers showed professionalism, restraint, and patience. CPD made Chicago proud last night." Despite Brown’s words, protesters alleged that CPD responded to the protesters with excessive force, escalating the confrontation. Over the last week, the Invisible Institute has begun a project to understand how CPD used force on May 30 and at protests since. We received over forty submissions from those present at the protests. [Ed. note: for a timeline of police actions against protesters on May 30, go to page 4.] Our analysis of dozens of videos and written accounts of the May 30 protest suggests that a substantial number of CPD officers used serious force in ways that appear to violate the department’s use of force rules. In particular, videos show officers hitting protesters with batons as they run away, kneel on the ground, or are restrained by other officers, potentially violating CPD rules that put heavy limits on baton use. The rules governing the use of batons were recently strengthened as part of the CPD consent decree with the Attorney General’s office requiring sweeping reforms in CPD. The monitor installed by the consent decree announced on Friday she would be investigating CPD’s use of force during the protests. The Invisible Institute chose to focus on CPD’s use of batons due to the high 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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volume of videos and the strict rules around the use of batons. CPD rules state that striking a person with a baton requires that they be classified as an “assailant,” someone “who is using or threatening the use of force against another person or himself/herself which is likely to cause physical injury.” The CPD rules note the seriousness of baton strikes, explaining that “although batons are considered less-lethal weapons, they can cause serious injury or death.” The Invisible Institute reviewed eleven videos that showed officers using their batons. Nearly all of the videos show actions that appear to violate department rules. In two separate videos, officers swing their batons at Black men without apparent cause. In one video, an officer apparently arguing with a man on the side of the street suddenly swings his baton at him, causing onlookers to scream. In another video, an officer approaches a man slowly riding a bike away from a line of police and swings his baton at the man’s back, hitting the back of the bike. Another video shows an officer repeatedly hitting a person with the end of his baton while several other officers hold him to the ground and dozens of other officers stand nearby. Other videos show police using force as they push into crowds of protesters. One video shows police moving into a crowd of protesters near the Wrigley Building. While most officers use their batons or arms to push protesters, one officer swings repeatedly into the crowd, hitting a person already being brought to the ground by another officer. A similar video shows police forming a line at the intersection of State and Kinzie Streets. While most officers maintain the line, one officer charges out to strike a protester who
appears to be backing away from him. These incidents highlight the variable response from other officers. In the first case, fellow officers make no move to stop the officer, handing him back his baton when it escapes his grip. In the second, police help pull their fellow officer back into line and protesters also attempt to de-escalate. In a handful of other videos, protesters take actions toward police that do not seem to warrant use of an impact weapon. In one video, a woman splashes some water onto an officer. He then grabs her head and hits her in the side with a baton. According to the person who took the video, he continued to hit her after she fell to the ground. In another video, a person appears to try and pick up what appears to be a tear gas canister. Officers converge around them and one begins to beat the person, who is squatting on the ground, with a baton. Only one video shows officers using force on a clear assailant, as defined by CPD rules. In that video, as officers push into a crowd, one attempts to punch a protester. Another protester then approaches the officer and swings his fist at him. The officer then hits the protester on the head with his baton. This use of force also raises concerns. Baton strikes to the head are even more heavily restricted, limited only to “when deadly force is justified,” which requires that the assailant is taking actions that “are immediately likely to cause death or great bodily harm.” Beyond videos, the Invisible Institute received six written accounts of similar incidents, with protesters alleging that police struck them without warning and in situations that would not justify use of a baton. Several included photos of bruising from alleged police baton strikes.
The uses of force by CPD officers raise troubling questions, though they also appear to show less systematic police brutality than events like the infamous 1968 “police riot,” when teams of officers beat protesters with their batons in full view of television cameras. The videos reviewed by the Invisible Institute show that individual officers struck protesters with batons while the majority stood by or used less serious types of force. In some cases, officers pulled back those using batons, while in many cases they simply stood by and did not intervene. The Invisible Institute will continue to analyze police use of force over the coming weeks and we welcome video or stories from anyone who has seen or experienced a police use of force since the start of protests in late May. You can email reporter Andrew Fan at andrew@invisibleinstitute.com. ¬ Additional reporting by Emma Perez, Invisible Institute. Andrew Fan is a reporter at the Invisible Institute. He last wrote for the Weekly in March about the criminal justice system’s response to COVID-19.
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In Bridgeport, Past and Present Live Side by Side Sightings of armed vigilantism highlight the neighborhood’s history and prompt questions about safety
BY RACHEL KIM
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n the evening of June 3, a video began circulating on Twitter of a group of men walking around a blocked intersection in Bridgeport. As the armed men, wielding baseball bats, pipes, and other makeshift weaponry, crowded the sidewalks in front of boarded-up businesses on West 31st Street and South Princeton Avenue, concerned residents who felt unsafe called the police, who apparently declined to intervene. That night, several accounts allege that armed men across the greater Bridgeport area harassed, threatened, and chased after people, many of whom were traveling to or from protests occurring in Bronzeville earlier that day. In the following days, angry residents and one of the armed men in the video met
at the office of 11th Ward Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson to air their concerns and frustrations, and the discussion continued on social media. Though a proposed march against vigilantism was canceled a day after the event was created, some are hopeful that a tentative open dialogue about what happened on the night of June 3 will address larger and more difficult issues facing the neighborhood. The events of the past week recall Bridgeport's sordid history of vigilantism and violence against people of color, some of which may be unknown or forgotten to the neighborhood’s residents. Many of those supporting the armed men vocally distanced themselves from that history. But while Bridgeport is more racially diverse than
A WHITE OFFICER SEARCHING BLACK MEN FOR WEAPONS IN A POLICE STATION. COURTESY OF CHICAGO COMMISSION ON RACE RELATIONS
it was ten or twenty years ago, the recent tension has highlighted divisions between "old" and "new" Bridgeport, which often fall along geographical and racial lines. At the heart of the conflict is the contested meaning of safety for Bridgeport residents. The armed men, seeing extensive media coverage of destroyed businesses across Chicago, took to the streets ostensibly in the name of safety. Many of the people who felt unsafe due to the armed men resolved to call or notify the police. But according to an email from Michael Cummings, the chair of the 11th Ward Independent Political Organization (IPO), residents reported that when they asked nearby Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers to intervene, the officers did nothing to respond to their requests for help. That their concerns seemed to fall on deaf ears raises questions about whether police are able or interested in keeping every Bridgeport resident safe, echoing discussions broached by ongoing international protests, and what the alternatives for those residents could be. Eric*, a resident of Bridgeport, said that he saw the night’s events unfolding beginning at a local bar on 33rd and Princeton. “Last night [the bar] was extremely busy because of reopening. There were probably thirty people on the patio,” said Eric. “A lot of those people were the ones who ended up running over to 31st...some of them were carrying bats or sticks and pipes or what-not.” Later that night, Alex*, another Bridgeport resident, recalled biking past large and unfamiliar pickup trucks patrolling up and down the streets, municipal trash cans barricading alleyways, and vigilantes roaming the neighborhood well past the
city’s curfew of 9pm. Alex reported passing by a group of five or six men wielding bats, who began following Alex as they biked past. When they reached a group of police officers stationed in Armour Square, Alex attempted to report the vigilantes. However, Alex said that the police officer laughed off their concern over the men, and refused to report the incident, stating that it is not illegal to walk down the street carrying a bat. In recordings of police scanners obtained by the Weekly, when the police dispatcher repeatedly relayed information that there was a group of men with bats around 31st and Princeton, officers described the vigilantes as “neighborhood folks.” In another scanner recording, an officer replies that a group of vigilantes on 47th and Halsted is “neighborhood people just trying to protect the neighborhood.” At a press conference the next day, Mayor Lori Lightfoot denounced any vigilante activity and denied that CPD was allowing armed vigilantes in Bridgeport. It's unclear if Lightfoot was simply unaware of the evidence at the time, in which case it's doubly unclear why she made any claims at all, or if she didn't consider men wielding bats and pipes to be sufficiently 'armed.' A group of concerned 11th Ward citizens presented Thompson with a letter written by resident Ambria Taylor, who had compiled anecdotes of Bridgeport residents experiencing harassment or intimidation from police officers and vigilantes. The letter included allegations that Bridgeport residents were “told directly by the police that people in the neighborhood would be after them” and others “were forced to show their leases by men with baseball bats... to be allowed to pass down 31st.” Another resident said that his “two Black friends JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
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coming over to his house...were chased away by [vigilantes] as they tried to approach.” Another resident reported that vigilantes were “drinking openly as they ‘patrolled.’” Thompson published a post on Facebook acknowledging that “tensions are very high” on the evening of June 3, but the citizens’ letter asked him to publicly condemn the vigilante activity in the neighborhood. Thompson later released a statement in the evening of June 4 saying that he does not condone vigilante violence and intimidation, but gave residents no alternatives to calling the police should they see vigilante activity. Michael Wagner was one of the armed men at 31st and Princeton on the night of June 3. In an interview with the Weekly, he was adamant that none of the men at that specific intersection were avowed white supremacists (one of the allegations) or actively harassed anybody, though he said he could not speak for the reports of violence in the greater Bridgeport area. He also went to the 11th Ward office the same day other residents dropped off the letter to Thompson. The individuals at the ward’s office all acknowledged that the conversation began as a heated and angry argument, but Wagner ended up apologizing. “If you guys see a bunch of men on the corner with bats, of course you would be scared. And rightfully so,” said Wagner. “And my point to them was—and not that it’s a good point—you were scared because you’ve never met us and you don’t know us. Granted, that doesn’t make it right...I’m sorry we struck fear, but there was no bad intention behind it besides to keep the neighborhood safe.” In a public June 5 Facebook post, Wagner detailed his conversation with Chris Kanich, a local resident involved with the Bridgeport Alliance, a neighborhood grassroots organization. "Just spent an hour on the phone with a man who is idk for lack of a better word their lead organizer. Great guy. Ironically he lived on my block my entire life and I never knew," Wagner wrote. “He has no issues with defending ourselves from anarchists, but to go out and threaten people for no reason is not okay and that’s what they are against. Understandable.” Wagner’s post also suggested that instead of congregating on the streets in large groups, people should only stand armed guard outside their own property. “We are all anti fuckin fascist but the antifa on the media are reckless and should be defended against.” He went on to write, “I 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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urge everybody to stand on your porches, or in front of your own businesses, with bats or what have you, and just hangout and don’t do anything unless something has to be done.” And when discussing the march that at the time was still scheduled for June 7, he wrote that it would most likely be peaceful and residents shouldn’t do anything to stop it, but “IF they did anything it some rogue group showed up, we can be on the scene so fast and beat the shit outta them.” Wagner’s post received both widespread approval and support, along with some criticism. Many of the positive reactions praised Wagner, who says he often goes by “Wagz,” for helping keep the peace and forging a connection between Bridgeport’s communities. Wagner and a few others hope to get on a Zoom call in the coming weeks and open up a larger discussion about what happened and why people felt the way they did. Some of his critics felt his apology didn’t go far enough to address the history of racial violence in Bridgeport, and that the people he spoke to didn’t represent everyone angry at the armed men. Wagner and other supporters of the armed men insisted that Bridgeport’s history of vigilantism and white supremacy didn’t define them. As one commenter put it, “Yall are going on facts based on history 40-50 years ago, and that most of those people hightailed their asses out of Bridgeport to the burbs long ago.” But while some of that history may have had its beginnings more than a hundred years ago, other parts are much more recent, suggesting at the very least that one of the divides in Bridgeport is between those who feel like the neighborhood’s past is firmly behind them, and those for whom it lives on in the present. Whatever the reality of the situation now, reckoning with that past may be part of the neighborhood’s healing process as it addresses the events of the past few days and beyond.
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once staunchly white European immigrant working class community (and the birthplace of five Chicago mayors since the 1930s), Bridgeport has long held a legacy of racist violence against Black Chicagoans. While Bridgeport was by no means the only neighborhood in Chicago known for this, it was uniquely home to organizations like the Hamburg Athletic Club, which was headquartered at 37th and Emerald and composed of young white men including former Mayor Richard J. Daley. A biography of Daley described
"[When I saw] vigilantes targeting people who look like me, in my experience, that was the first time I was actually afraid to be in my neighborhood, to be in Bridgeport.” the club as “part social circle, part political organization, and part street gang.” Founded in 1904, the Hamburg, along with similar white “athletic clubs” in the city such as the Ragen’s Colts and Aylwards, “started enforcing imaginary Jim Crow boundaries to stop blacks from encroaching into Irish neighborhoods” as the Black population of Chicago doubled between 1915 and 1940, according to a history published on The Root. Poet Langston Hughes once recalled how after taking a walk past the imagined color line on Wentworth Avenue in 1918, he returned to his home “with black eyes and a swollen jaw, having been beaten up by an unidentified Irish street gang…‘who said they didn’t allow n------ in that neighborhood.” The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found these white “athletic clubs” to be responsible for instigating many of the violent attacks against Black Chicagoans before and during the 1919 Chicago Race Riots. The Commission’s report also found that these athletic clubs had the political pull to “fix” the police department in their favor, allowing them to avoid repercussions for their actions. A member of the Ragen’s Colts reported that the police were “told to lay off on club members,” tipped off club members about heightened police activity, and even rode around in cars to protect club members “in case [they] were picked up.” According to the report, a judge of the municipal court testified to the Commission, “They seemed to think they had a sort of protection which entitled them to go out and assault anybody. When the race riots occurred, it gave them something to satiate the desire to inflict their evil propensities on others.” Organized efforts at racial violence from white “athletic clubs” like the Hamburg made Bridgeport a dangerous neighborhood for Black Chicagoans throughout the twentieth century. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the Black population of Bridgeport did not increase above 0.2 percent from the
1930s to the 1960s. Bridgeport residents employed a number of violent tactics to terrorize Black people and keep them out of the neighborhood. When the Douglas Hotel north of Dearborn Homes burned down in June 1961, eighty of its Black residents were evacuated by the Red Cross to Bridgeport’s Holy Cross Lutheran Church. Upon hearing the news, white residents soon began demanding that the Black fire victims be removed from Bridgeport. The pastor’s wife later recounted that they “threatened to break the windows in the church and screamed obscenities...they threatened to destroy the church if we didn’t get the Negroes out of the building.” In 1964, a white mob threw rocks at an apartment a couple blocks north of the Daley family home that had been rented out to two Black college students. According to Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, the police then “removed the students’ belongings, and told them when they returned from school that they had been evicted.” Wendell*, who grew up in the nowdemolished LeClaire Courts in Archer Heights, recalled how Wentworth Avenue separated Bridgeport from neighboring Black communities. Throughout the late seventies, he frequently went to the old Comiskey Park to catch White Sox games. But throughout his youth, Bridgeport was widely known as a “sundown town” where Black Chicagoans would be in danger after dark. “There was an old wives tale in the eighties that the cops would kidnap young Black kids and throw them in Bridgeport to finish them off,” said Wendell. “That was something my parents would tell me...it was the boogeyman place where you don’t want to get caught.” This warning rang true—in 1989, the Los Angeles Times reported that a thousand protestors marched in Bridgeport against police brutality, citing an incident in 1988 in which two fourteen-year-old Black boys were arrested at Comiskey
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Summer to Black Power, Bridgeport during Daley’s reign “channeled thousands of police officers onto the CPD’s employment rolls,” including multiple members of the Daley family. These personal connections “‘made it easy for him to overlook the shortcomings of some of its members.’” Bridgeport is still widely considered to be a police neighborhood. When Paul Bauer, a CPD commander who lived in Bridgeport, was killed in 2018, the streets of the neighborhood were lined with blue ribbons and other memorials. The personal relationships that many generations of white Bridgeport residents have with police officers could explain the police response on June 3. When police officers describe armed vigilantes as “people from the neighborhood,” they may mean, quite literally, their neighbors or family.
POLICE ESCORTING TWO BLACK MEN OUT OF THEIR HOUSE DURING RIOTS. COURTESY OF CHICAGO COMMISSION ON RACE RELATIONS
Park by police for violating curfew, beaten by the officers, and then “[dropped] off in Canaryville, where they were chased and beaten by a gang of whites.” During the protest, “some of the whites who lined the street shouted profanities or racial slurs... carried the Irish flag and chanted ‘White Power.’” The two officers involved in the incident were indicted, but similar practices continued citywide throughout at least the 1990s. The 2017 Department of Justice investigation into the CPD found that officers would routinely take young suspects to rival gang neighborhoods, and abandon them there, in order to coerce them into providing information. In 1997, a thirteen-year-old Black boy named Lenard Clark was attacked and beaten into a coma by three white teenagers as he biked along the border of Bridgeport. The case, extensively detailed in Steve Bogira’s Courtroom 302, was viewed as a bellwether for whether or not white perpetrators of anti-Black violence would face stringent consequences. Bogira also notes the entrenched power structures in Bridgeport—business owners, union leaders, and family with purported mob ties—who lobbied the judge to give the teenagers a lighter sentence. The New York Times reported that “the teenagers later bragged about keeping blacks out of the neighborhood.”
A Tribune article from the same year reported that “the first black family to move into the Bridgeport Homes [a low-rise public housing complex] a few years ago was forced out by egg throwing and harassment.” By 2000, the Black population of Bridgeport had only risen above one percent. The legacy of Bridgeport’s anti-Black violence remains palpable even in recent years; the Black population of Bridgeport has averaged at only 2.5 percent from 2013 to 2017.
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he influence of the Hamburg Athletic Club was by no means limited to physical violence in Bridgeport. Instead, it became one of the strongest bastions of the Cook County Democratic Party machine. Former presidents of Hamburg, like former Aldermen Joseph McDonough and Tommy Doyle, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, were able to win local elections thanks to the widespread mobilization of its members. And when Bridgeport-bred mayors controlled the city consecutively from 1933 to 1979, the Chicago Tribune reported that the neighborhood became “Chicago’s political center” thanks to patronage systems that gave Bridgeport residents lucrative jobs with the city. In 1977, the New York Times estimated that “5,000 of the 20,000 patronage workers are from the 11th Ward.” According to Simon Balto’s Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red
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ridgeport is more racially diverse than ever; the neighborhood is now majority minority, with sixty three percent identifying as either Latinx or Asian. It’s changing in other ways, too— the median house price rose 9.9 percent in 2019 (double the city’s increase of 4.8 percent)—and worries that gentrification is on its way are common. When Johnny O’s—which at various points in its history served as a neighborhood bar, restaurant, and more recently, convenience store and hot dog stand—closed its doors last year, neighborhood residents, recent and established, mourned the loss of a workingclass institution. “Johnny O’s was old school. It added character,” said one lifelong resident. But change doesn’t come without opposition, or happen all at once. Even in recent years, the persistence of vigilantism, racial hostility, and conflicts around police protests remains a reality in Bridgeport. In 2012, a protest against police brutality in Bridgeport ended with a public “shouting match” and a scuffle between a neighborhood resident and a protestor, according to NBC Chicago. In 2015, DNAinfo reported on Bridgeport men who acted as the “Neighborhood Watch.” According to the article, the three (unarmed) men drove around the neighborhood at night and reported burglaries, suspected gang activity, and broken street lights to the police, many of whom recognized the men as local vigilantes. The same year, two Bridgeport rallies were set for the same day—one in support of CPD and one against police misconduct. Both were canceled.
Amanda’s* family, which is ChineseAmerican, has lived in Bridgeport for three generations. While growing up, she and her family have also experienced the neighborhood’s hostility against Chinese immigrants who were moving outside of Chinatown and Armour Square towards Bridgeport. “The first time I was ever racialized was around the intersection of where the video happened...it was the first time I was called a racial slur by a white child around my age,” said Amanda. “My sister was chased by two white boys on bikes while she was walking home with her friend, who was also AsianAmerican.” Still, Amanda notes that there are local organizations in Bridgeport, like the Bridgeport Alliance, that are doing valuable work to support the neighborhood’s residents of color. But she still feels as if there’s an “indirect silencing of people of color [because of ] the fear of racialized violence.”
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he events of the past few days have only further cemented that Bridgeport’s residents of color are still confronted with the neighborhood’s past. But it’s less clear what the neighborhood can do to address those issues and ensure that every one of its residents feel safe. In response to the vigilantes, some local residents cobbled together a counterprotest scheduled for June 7. But even the Facebook page of the event is full of controversy, with some people expressing concerns about retaliation and intimidation against Black and brown protestors and the protest’s lack of communication with Black organizing groups. Other comments came from disapproving Bridgeport residents who thought more residents should be thankful for the vigilantes. Eventually, the protest was canceled due to safety concerns. “Over the course of the last couple days, lots of people have been calling for protests, but people who know the realities on the ground in Bridgeport today, and its history when it comes to clashes between white people and nonwhite people, are kind of recognizing that you can’t just say you’re going to stage a protest without doing your due diligence to make sure people who attend can have a reasonable expectation of safety,” said Chris Kanich, who is involved with the Bridgeport Alliance and a coleader of the Greater Bridgeport Mutual Aid organization. “You have a high onus to make sure people stay safe. Bridgeport feels JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
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like a tinderbox right now.” Pastor Nic, who has been working at First Lutheran Church of the Trinity since 2019, said she has never felt hostility or disrespect from the people in her ministry, but agreed that the neighborhood remains a flashpoint for conflict for many people of color. “It’s complicated and it’s difficult because there are bits of hope I see in Bridgeport,” she said in an interview with the Weekly. “And then while we’re having a conversation with Alderman Thompson I see police circling the block eight times. Eight times for a thirty or forty minute conversation….I stress that because it reinforces why this action had happened. We are being overpoliced. If we are going to rely on cops to do the work of protecting and serving, rather than circling around and trying to get a sense of what concerned constituents are doing with the alderman, they should be out making sure people are not taking the law into their own hands.” Many of the residents’ disappointment
with the unwillingness or inability of the police to make them feel safe comes as protests across the world question the role of police in public safety, and ask people to reimagine what it would take to keep communities safe. But since people taking up arms and patrolling the streets themselves doesn’t appear to be a good answer, it raises the possibility that neighborhood residents may need to come together and figure it out themselves. “[When I saw] vigilantes targeting people who look like me, in my experience, that was the first time I was actually afraid to be in my neighborhood, to be in Bridgeport,” she continued. “But what was inspiring and hopeful was that without even asking, community members and parishioners said that they were going to come by the church on Tuesday. They’re recognizing that there is potential for something to happen, especially since we are on 31st Street. People showed up. That in itself was a redemptive peace for me in my experience and relationship with Bridgeport.”
“Although these might not be all lifetime Bridgeport residence [sic], they love this neighborhood and want it to be safe for all,” Wagner wrote in his post. “I realize some stubbornness here and I know a few will read this and blow me off and think I’m a “sellout”, but know I am doing this and talking to strangers and going to ward offices, for you. For us. Because already Bridgeport has gotten too much negative attention, and wrongfully so.” “There is a consensus...that we all want to live in a safe neighborhood, and we all want to have a safe place to have businesses, and we all want to thrive as a community,” said Amanda. “I don’t know how or what that would look like. That’s where I’m kind of struggling with...I think it’s unearthing a lot of things that were never really addressed or talked about within the community.” ¬ Numerous interviewees requested their names to be changed or for their last names to be withheld for the concern of their own safety.
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CO N TAC T U S AT 3 1 2 . 3 37. 24 0 0
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Rachel Kim is a senior editor. She last wrote about the Gage Park High School fifty year Black students reunion.
ACTIVISM
“I wanted to do something for my neighborhood” Spurred by love for her community, a young resident plunges into activism amid chaos BY GRACE ASIEGBU
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n the wake of looting during the massive demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder, Chicago community members are banding together to repair and restore their neighborhoods while also repairing and restoring each other. “After protesting on Saturday and seeing what happened on Sunday, it made me really sad. I didn’t want what happened to hit our neighborhoods. At the end of the day, these are resources for us,” Kierra Wooden said. Wooden, a twenty-two year old resident of South Shore, said she understood the anger people felt. “We’re hearing a lot of negativity about what’s going on. This isn’t the first time riots have happened. I wanted to do something for my neighborhood. We care about it.” By Sunday evening, May 31, Wooden had already begun organizing her friends and family members, posting flyers all over social media and creating a PayPal account for people to send donations for supplies and food if they can’t donate their time or are afraid to amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. She’d never organized a demonstration or community event before. “It’s terrifying, honestly,” she said. “As an organizer, you’re in a position to be a leader, and with leadership comes great responsibility. People trust me with this because I just came up with the idea. Once I got through feeling my feelings on Sunday, I made the flyer, asked for some advice….I have a really great support system from friends and co-workers and social media.” Wooden’s planned clean-up and supply distribution initiative targeted some of the South Side’s hardest hit areas: Halsted
Street in Roseland, the 95th Street-Stony Island strip, the Jewel-Osco parking lot on 87th and State Streets, 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, the Walmart at 47th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, and the 35th Street Lake Meadows shopping center. By the time Wooden officially launched the cleanup on June 3, many of the places listed on the flyer had been cleaned and boarded up. But Kyra Felton, a twenty-yearold volunteer, said plans were still in place to distribute cleaning and food supplies to people in need. “You have main streets that were looted, but you have small local businesses by people’s actual residences that have been looted too,” she said. They distributed supplies such as gloves, masks, cleaning products, and food—“anything that they can’t get, because these are areas that people don’t have those resources at all.” According to the organizers’ estimates, over 600 people from Evanston to Hammond, Ind. came out to help clean and distribute roughly $1,000 worth of supplies and food to those who needed it most. Felton’s motive for cleaning up her neighborhood is clear: helping those around her see an issue from a different perspective through community engagement. “It’s really easy to criticize people for action that you may or may not partake in, especially if it’s criminal or immoral,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are not socially aware and my goal is to continue indirectly educating them.” Illi Dalton, thirty-one, a long-time resident and community organizer born in South Shore and currently residing in Canaryville, said Mayor Lori Lightfoot is
VOLUNTEERS SMILE FOR THE CAMERAS DURING WOODEN'S SOUTH SIDE CLEANUP INITIATIVE ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3. PHOTO BY GRACE ASIEGBU
partially to blame for the unrest in the South and West sides of the city. “It was all part of the plan for Lori to lock off downtown, giving these alerts thirty minutes before [curfew] just to jam people up,” he said. Lightfoot came under fire for 9:00 p.m. curfews instituted on both days over the weekend of May 30-31, with notifications sometimes reaching Chicagoans’ phones after the curfew took effect. There were also harsh criticisms of the CTA and Metra suspensions that followed the curfew sanctions. “It was a tactic to cut off access,” twentyfour-year-old Latinx community organizer Ashley De la Torre said. “I think someone quoted it very nicely on Twitter. ‘The people in their castles lifted their bridges so people wouldn’t destroy their pretty downtown businesses.’” While she said she doesn’t condone looting, like most of the volunteers, De la Torre understands what took place was of necessity and not solely to cause chaos and destruction. De la Torre said the South and West sides haven’t had access to necessary resources “for a very long time, longer than just this past week.” “It was a very cathartic thing we're seeing because it's just years but also weeks of these overlapping racial inequities, economic inequities.” According to Dalton, in part because the curfew and transit suspensions trapped people within their neighborhoods, they focused their rage on the places around them. While he understands the frustrations, he feels the looting and destruction on the South and West Sides was counterproductive.
“What’s going on right now is justified in a sense,” he said. “My whole thing is, looting the grocery stores and other stores we frequent every day didn’t make sense. We’re fighting a war and we’re depleting our own resources.” The different sites for the South Side cleanup had volunteer representatives coordinating people at each respective location. Dalton is the point of contact for the 47th Street meetup group. He said that while it’s unfortunate South Siders have to clean up messes created by some of their own neighbors, these cleanup initiatives can be a starting point towards rebuilding stronger community bonds. “There are a lot of people who’ve lived next door to each other for years and they’ve never talked to each other,” he said. “Maybe this is the destruction we needed to happen to build, or it could be the very demise of what we had going for us in the first place.” A young and fresh-faced Wooden has similar aspirations for the impact of the South Side cleanup initiative she spearheaded: long-term community empowerment. “I am still learning... but I want us to have control over our communities,” she said. “I want us to care for, support and uplift each other.” ¬ Grace Asiegbu is a master’s student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications. She specializes in social justice and investigative reporting. In her spare time, she loves to sing, ask questions, and stan Beyoncé. Her Twitter is @_uzunma.
JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
INTERVIEWS
“There’s no words to describe how most of us are feeling” The Weekly interviews Englewood activist Asiaha Butler BY MARTHA BAYNE Asiaha Butler is the president of R.A.G.E., the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. The lifelong Englewood native has been working to effect change in the neighborhood for the last ten years by activating public spaces, fostering positive dialogue between young people and old, and encouraging creative community development initiatives. The most recent project, Go Green on Racine, developed in partnership with the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, Teamwork Englewood, and E.G. Woode, aims to bring new investment to the commercial corridor at 63rd and Racine, and is one of several South Side projects in competition for the $10 million Chicago Prize, a place-based community development grant funded by the Pritzker Traubert Foundation (other prize finalists are projects in South Chicago, AuburnGresham, and Little Village, as well as Austin and North Lawndale).The coalition held a groundbreaking for the new Go Green Fresh Market, an independent grocery store at 1207 West 63rd Street intended to be an anchor of the Go Green on Racine development, on February 27. Three weeks later the city shut down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic; to date fifty-four people from Englewood and West Englewood are recorded as having died from the disease. On Sunday, May 31, in the aftermath of protests against police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Englewood was one of many South Side neighborhoods severely damaged by looting. The Weekly spoke with Butler on June 3; this conversation has been edited for clarity.
I
probably have to give two different perspectives, because it's one perspective as the R.A.G.E. president, you know, working on revitalization and all that work. And then it's my perspective as a resident who had to witness the looting from my porch for the last forty-eight hours. It's kind of hard a little bit, so just bear with me. 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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PHOTO COURTESY OF ASIAHA BUTLER
From a community revitalization standpoint, we knew our communities lack economic vitality. We know that at least thirty percent of the people in Englewood are living below the poverty line. We have the highest unemployment. We kind of know those facts already exist in Englewood, and when opportunity comes up for some of those people to take advantage of a store that has taken advantage of them or businesses that are not clean, that disrespect the very people that solicit those and consume those stores… When that uprising happened, I wouldn't say it was justified but I would just say that we didn't have much anyway, right? You're talking about a group of folks who have been through the system of racism that bred such destructive behavior. And I
don't know what other ways that they've been able to express themselves, but I know for me that was the first time…that I have seen an intense level of desperation, and an intense level of destruction. I have never witnessed something like that before. Was that energy probably already boiling over? Sure. It’s been 400 years like this. It is not a secret that we are all oppressed. And now [with COVID] … to have been slowly and steadily trying to turn that curve, and to kind of like slowly but steadily turn that curve and then to be knocked down so quickly, in a matter of twenty-four hours... There’s no words to describe how most of us are feeling. We only have three banks in our
community—all three banks are all closed. Most folks in our community actually depend on the currency exchange. Many of our seniors depend on the currency exchange. And those are all looted and vandalized. We know that most people need prescription medicine and there is not a place here that you can get that. We're not the North Side, so we don't have local drugstores; we depend on Walgreens and CVS. We know we are a food desert. We don't have many options for groceries here. And now we have none. So it’s a lot to take on and I’m really at this point... if it’s not really reparations and a whole, like BET is saying, trillion dollar investment, I don't know how we will bounce back.
INTERVIEWS
We were already doing food giveaways for COVID, because people have issues getting food. I don’t know where they’re getting food now. I used to go to Aldi, but Aldi is closed. Yesterday I tried to go to the bank; my bank is boarded up. The ATM is gone. We was looking for water and there was nowhere to get a case of water. All the gas stations are extremely crowded, because [there are only a few left open]. I'm getting calls about my people needing diapers and wipes and essential things... we thought we needed essential things before, but this is, like, dire. This is devastating. So we're pausing a little bit about thinking about what is the best way for us to move forward to truly rebuild Englewood, because… over here next to the R.A.G.E. office in my home [at 66th and Union], it's a vacant lot that’s three acres that everybody was able to pull up on in the back of the liquor store, in the back of the Family Dollar. But they didn't cause the vacant lot. I'm looking at a system that allows folks to have a hundred cars on a vacant lot. I saw the folks doing efforts to clean up—I have
contacted my alderman about the weeds in our community for the last two weeks! It was never clean. All these things were already devastated. And now you just added more devastation, more destruction. Some of the institutions that are here, who took a risk, may not come back. Some of the small Black-owned businesses that are struggling with capital and insurance and high prices and being in Englewood who got looted, they're not coming back. I mean unless we really really think about a long-term incentivized strategy and protection for our community. And those are the things that I’m pondering about and reflecting about, more so than kind of just jumping out and trying to clean up, you know, a liquor store. 66th and Union sits behind Halsted, so today I woke up to a fire at City Sports. Some people is calm and they were able to drive around to see the mayhem, whereas me and my brother, my husband, and my close friend has to move our cars, we had to try to secure our place because we didn't know how far the desperation will go or the
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destruction will go. It scared a lot of our tenants. And so it hits different. So, I don't know what to say. I mean of course we want justice in America more than probably any other race in this country. Was that the way to get it? Probably not. Did it probably wake up some people’s eyes and make people think differently and ponder on how we move forward? I hope so. I think a few of us are in agreement around true reflection, and around true demands for what would it take to really rebuild this. And thank God we are a part of the Go Green on Racine project... because a corridor that was so dormant is the most lively corridor. Most of those stores on 63rd and Racine did not get touched. I mean it's ironic because everybody was at 63rd and Halsted, and everybody was over on Ashland. You go down 63rd, there's nothing there. The liquor stores, the Whole Foods is boarded up. Our PNC is boarded up. AT&T is boarded up, Oak Street Health is not operable, where the seniors go for health services. But you go to 63rd and Racine and the gas station is still open, the liquor store’s still open, and the Brothers [fast food] restaurant is still open. I know I don't know if that's a good thing or bad. You know to see a whole entire retail corridor—these are not anything like the North Side. Our retail corridor is a fish place and cell phone place and Dunkin Donuts and Subway. Even still, to see that those things have been completely destroyed, it's hurtful. I don't think I've never felt anything like this before in my life. I wasn't here in ‘68, so I don't know what happened in ‘68. But I just keep hearing from other leaders like hey, ‘68—the West Side never came back. And that's scary and daunting to hear. I do long-term systemic work. This is not a quick fix. I don’t need shovels. I don’t need gloves. We need capital. We need access to capital to rebuild these spaces. We need a corridor that we shouldn't have to question if it was looted or not because the buildings are already boarded up. This devastation existed before this, but no one was willing to help then. So I don't have a “help” solution for folks. I would say pray for us. Organize some banks who are for real about lending to not only give to businesses but to other folks to get mortgages so they can own. Because that's also an issue. If you don't own in a community you really don't mind tearing up that community. You know, owners are not going to tear up their property. We don't do that.
We’ve been doing work that’s more long-term. When we talk about repurposing vacant schools or TIF reform, those are long-term systemic policy changes. The looting? Yeah, you can go out quickly and clean, but where are the jobs? Where is the training? Where is the capital? Why do our corridors look the way they look, anyway? That's the real hope. So you know how you get millions of dollars in a community development improvement fund? Those are the things I'm thinking about, and those are the conversations we were having before. I mean, people are donating to R.A.G.E. and asking about clean-up, and we are responding. But if you don't live here and you just work here, like a non-profit, and you didn't see what we saw, that sickened our stomachs—that made me, my husband, and my brother not be able to eat, not be able to sleep? I think the best you can do is not ask us what we need for help right now. I think the best thing that people can do is to just pause for a second. I mean, we’ve been working on trying to make the community better. I'm not an emotional organizer, so I'm not jumping off emotions. I need to sit with my emotions. I need to process it. I need to see what I glean, what I learn from this. I was not emotional over a liquor store burning down. Yeah, no. I was emotional over the energy and activity I witnessed. I know some leaders feel the need to jump into action, but R.A.G.E. doesn’t really work that way. The only action that we have taken in the last twenty-four to fortyeight hours is the people who know us who still need things. These are folks who need diapers and folks who need wipes. It is still folks who need food. It is folks who are still battling with COVID. It is Black businesses that still need support. That's the approach that R.A.G.E. is taking right now, until we can all kind of regroup and think about how we continue to rebuild. ¬ Martha Bayne is a managing editor of the Weekly. She last wrote about how food pantries are adapting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
ARTS
Sestina for the Looting of the Black Body POEM & PHOTOS BY AV BENFORD
AGAIN
DELORES BENFORD AND KENDALL SIMPSON WATCH "LOOTING" ON 87TH FROM THEIR STOOP ON CALUMET.
SHAWNDEL BROWN IN FRONT OF HER STORE “DREAM CREATIONS,” WHERE SHE HAD BEEN KEEPING WATCH WITH HER FIREARM FOR OVER 24 HOURS.
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the police killed a Black man. And again Sharpton dressed sharply is making sharp points in a eulogy. Think of it as an act of self-immolation— the dragging of the politic of this Black body— to the town square of the street corner and strip mall. The burning of flesh. The looting of her clothing, and shoes, the ransacking of her adornments, and conveniences. Placate her with leaders whose faces are black, but who mistakenly believe that this time “rage” will be selective in its outburst— that rage will be responsible— that rage will act with respectability. Pelt her flesh with rubber bullets. Bash her head on the sidewalk. Use a no-knock warrant. In service of that Black respectability call her a suspect so that she is executed in her sleep and denied burial. Give statements in solidarity’s eulogy. Drag her by the hair. Call her cause righteous and give lip service to protest. Tell her— her rage must be beneficial. Watch her as she smiles back at you through broken teeth and lip, this body. Tell her to be peaceful when you really mean quiet. With boisterous speeches placate and kneel as the hearse of her contract with this society passes by. And with looting and arson— when she rattles this cage, with baseball bats-- mob up against the rage— throw bricks through windows And drag Black folks from cars, accuse them of looting and pin her kindred to the ground— because there is no true power— only power over this Black body. Tell her to be non-violent when you really mean act with complicity and with respectability. When the banks to her community lend 12 cents for every dollar they lend to white areas, a eulogy for Black homeownership. A eulogy for small business expansion. With grants placate—
AFTERMATH AT FAMILY DOLLAR
"LET IT BURN" (STAR BEAUTY)
REALTOR/ COMMUNITY MEMBER WHITNEY HAMPTON AND HER CLEAN-UP CREW. PICTURED IN FRONT OF SHOE TIME ON COTTAGE GROVE NEAR 86TH.
ARTS
Assure her that corporate chains mean investment and with minor minority programs placate. Put in dollar stores where there were once black-owned grocery stores and watch sledgehammers rage through back doors in business districts. And for 87th and Cottage Grove—- a eulogy. When the children of this body— burn and flood and strip to the rafters with looting that which was never truly ours— act surprised at this lack of respectability. And when they turn on Black-owned stores, like sharks following a slave ship, mourn this body. As her children sing her grandparents’ rallying cries, mourn this body. As another is crushed under the blue wall, with indictments placate. Watch as naked in the middle of the street she never breaks gaze. Respectability here is paying homage by kneeling on broken glass. Watch as she lifts her hand, chews the shards in a rage. Watch as she calls Mama with a bloody mouth. Watch this goddess of looting pour the gasoline and light the match. In the fire, she does not scream, she conjures a eulogy. For this Black body, she chants for inextinguishable rage for death to incremental change— that we remain difficult to placate with shiny things like thoughts and prayers. For this Black body, she begs for an end to our continual looting. As the flames consume her visage she pleas for the heavy of this moment to be an undying movement. For Black respectability and the politics it adheres to, she sings a long overdue eulogy.
AV Benford is a staff writer at the Weekly. Her last article for the Weekly was 'Krista Franklin is Real AF.' JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
JUSTICE
School Cited for Feeding Protesters The Chicago Freedom School opened its doors to people who were trapped in the Loop after George Floyd protests and ordered pizza. Then police showed up. BY JIM DALEY AND KIRAN MISRA ESSENCE-JADE GATHERIGHT (LEFT) AND JACQULYN HAMILTON. PHOTO BY JERMAINE W.
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ate in the evening of May 30, as unrest swirled across the Loop and River North and reports of violence and looting blared from police scanners, a squad of CPD officers and investigators from the Department of Business and Consumer Protection (BACP) stood in the doorway of the Chicago Freedom School, demanding entry. The officers said they had received a complaint that the school was illegally preparing and serving food without a retail food establishment license. The investigators, Joseph Sneed and Ira Navarro, inspected the school’s offices and tiny kitchenette and gave school staff a cease-and-desist letter. The letter threatened them with arrest if they were caught serving food again. Several hours earlier, following protests that devolved into clashes with police, the city had raised bridges over the Chicago River, closed CTA train stations, and hastily 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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declared a curfew. Hundreds were trapped in the Loop. Chicago Freedom School (CFS) opened the doors of its office at State and Polk to young protesters so they could shelter from the mayhem and avoid arrest while arranging rides home. The nonprofit South Loop school, founded in 2007 and inspired by Civil Rights–era freedom schools in Mississippi, offers leadership training and educates youth aged fourteen to twenty-one on social justice movement history. Staff sent word through social media and the school’s community networks that it was a safe haven. Then they ordered pizzas for the hungry arrivals. Jacqulyn Hamilton, the wellness coordinator at CFS, headed to the school to help. “We have a history of opening up and being a safe space for young people of color downtown,” she said. “In the past we’ve offered our space as a warming center, healing space, bathroom, and place where
you can decompress and figure out next steps.” As she walked down State Street towards the school, Hamilton saw police blocking young people from leaving the Loop at multiple intersections. “You could see police in riot gear and in formation advancing [on] the crowd, essentially pushing them back and forth,” she said. She had trouble reaching the school herself because of the blockades. Essence-Jade Gatheright, a member of the CFS youth leadership board who had attended the protest earlier in the day, also made her way to the school. Shortly after 6pm, Gatheright tweeted that the school was open and had food, water, and phone chargers for protesters who couldn’t get home. The tweet was shared over 21,900 times. People soon began arriving, and before long, dozens of youth were sheltering there.
Hamilton posted up at the school’s front door to let people in, distributing masks and gloves and reminding them to practice social distancing. She said she lost count of how many eventually took refuge there. Because rideshare services were unavailable, staff sent word through the school’s wideranging community network to find people who could give rides home to those stranded there. Community allies came through, and drivers “were dropping people at home and coming back for more young people” all evening, she said. Around 11pm, at which point the office had been emptied of protesters, the officers showed up. “They said that they were investigators, but they were dressed in riot gear,” Hamilton said. “They looked like police, but the police officer that I was speaking to was insisting he was not a police officer.” A source at the BACP who spoke off the record confirmed that CPD
JUSTICE
accompanied investigators to the school that night. A squad car sat by the curb. Despite the fact that windows could be heard shattering up and down the block, the police had a singular mission: getting inside the school. “A couple of the officers started to escalate a little bit,” Hamilton said. “You could tell that they got irritated when I was asking them questions and refusing entry and started to raise their voices, so much so that the guy from the Department of Business had to come in and quell them and quiet them down.” She said that at some points, she was “very sure” that if Sneed had not been there, the police would have physically removed her. Tony Alvarado-Rivera, the director of youth programs at CFS, came to the entrance to talk to the investigators and police. “And this was all while people are running [past the office], things are breaking, it’s very chaotic, very hectic,” Alvarado-Rivera said. “And they were not moving from our door. They definitely wanted to gain entry and wanted to see if we were housing protesters.” Alvarado-Rivera eventually relented, and the police and investigators entered the empty office. They photographed the pizza boxes—which were clearly emblazoned with the logo of the pizzeria—as well as some CFS literature, and inspected the office’s tiny kitchenette, which does not have an oven or stove. Sneed and Navarro produced a letter that accuses CFS of operating a retail food establishment without a license and orders the school to “CEASE AND DESIST conducting the business or occupation of preparing and serving food on premises not described on license for which a Retail Food Establishment license” is required. The letter, which bears Navarro’s signature, also says the police will arrest any CFS employees found to be “preparing and serving food on premises” without a license. “We don’t have the physical capacity to prepare food,” Alvarado-Rivera said. “We barely have a fridge. So, for them to see that [space] and say we are preparing and distributing food commercially is absurd.” In an email to the Weekly, Tim Delaney, the president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, wrote that certain nonprofits—such as soup kitchens or museums—will likely have permits in place because serving food is part of their missionrelated work. “But a nonprofit purchasing some food for an impromptu gathering… likely wouldn’t apply for permits,” he wrote.
“And, just as likely, legal authorities would never even think about taking action.” “If an organization…provided shelter and food to people in need of a safe place off the streets during a curfew—whether in place due to a blizzard or public protesting— then I would think that a city’s leaders and residents would thank that organization,” Delany wrote, “not try to punish it.” Prentice Butler, the chief of staff for 4th Ward alderman Sophia King, said the alderman had not been aware that BACP investigators cited the school and added that King’s office would look into the matter. Brendan Shiller, an attorney from whom CFS sought guidance on how to deal with the situation, said the law cited in the order “clearly doesn’t apply” to providing free pizza that was purchased from a restaurant. “This is clear harassment,” Shiller said. Gatheright said she felt CPD targeted the school because they found out it was sheltering protesters. A CPD spokesperson declined to comment and said the BACP would do so on their behalf. In an email to the Weekly, Issac Reichman, the BACP Director of Public Information, wrote that CPD had notified BACP that the school “was preparing and serving large quantities of food without the proper retail food establishment license.” When asked by email why investigators had issued the citation even though the school had merely ordered pizzas, Reichman did not immediately respond. “I definitely feel that it was an attempt to intimidate us and to intimidate young people who were protesting,” Hamilton said. “We work with young Black and Brown people as they figure out how to be change agents in their community…they came specifically looking for ways to intimidate young Black and Brown people, especially in light of the fact that it’s young Black and Brown people in the streets.” ¬
"They came specifically looking for ways to intimidate young Black and Brown people, especially in light of the fact that it’s young Black and Brown people in the streets.”
Full Disclosure: Jim Daley’s spouse is a former employee of CFS. She was the school’s operations coordinator from September 2017 to May 2019. Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last wrote about the aldermanic response to COVID-19. Kiran Misra is a writer for the Weekly who primarily covers criminal justice and policing in Chicago. She last wrote about CPD Superintendent David Brown. JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21
COLORING PAGE
MONICA TRINIDAD
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POLITICS
Census Spotlight Centers for New Horizons BY EMELINE POSNER MARY FREELOVE
A
little girl dances on the sidewalk, bouncing and skipping and shaking her pigtails to Ciara’s “Level Up.” The piece of paper she’s holding up to the camera reads “Level Up Challenge”; the other words on the page fade from view in the strong midday light. Her parents filmed her dancing as part of a challenge from the Instagram account @ChicagoBabiesCount, which shared the video as part of its initiative to encourage Chicago parents to count their kids on the 2020 Census. @ChicagoBabiesCount popped up on my Instagram feed just after Census Day on April 1. Their posts are curated, featuring pictures of happy babies, young kids, and their parents, with captions providing information on how to fill out the census and why it’s important. Although Census Day has passed, the response submission deadline has been extended to October 31 because of the COVID-19 crisis. “If a newborn was born before April 1st, then be sure to include them on your Census response,” reads one. “Census funding helps children of all ages get the services they need like schools, community centers, parks, and playgrounds” reads another. Nationwide data shows that kids younger than five is the age group at highest risk of being missed in the decennial census count. In the 2010 census, nearly a million kids in this age group were not counted, according to the Census Bureau. Of those, according to data from Forefront, the Illinois association of nonprofits and grantmakers,
MARY FREELOVE
around 100,000 of these kids were in Cook County. A report from the George Washington Institute of Public Policy estimated that Illinois lost at least $953 per year for every person missed in the 2010 count. That means less funding for SNAP, Medicaid, early childhood programs, and other essential services. That’s why Centers for New Horizons, the nonprofit behind @ChicagoBabiesCount and its sister Facebook and TikTok pages, is going the extra mile for census outreach this year. “You can’t afford not to do this,” said Dana Garner, Centers’ project director for census outreach. Garner said that by counting kids who are currently under five, “you are building a foundation for children” so that when they are older they will “have summer jobs, … have parks to play in.” Garner said that “parents being parents, not having the time to do it,” is a big reason why kids in this age group are undercounted. They may have the perception that “it doesn’t impact them right away,” she said. Studies suggest that living in a “hardto-count” tract, where there are historically low census response rates, may contribute an undercount among young children. Kids are also at higher risk of not being counted if they belong to a multigenerational or complex household—where parents share custody, or a grandparent or other family member cares for the kids—or to a household that rents and moves often.
In the 2010 census, nearly a million kids in this age group were not counted. Latinx and Black children are the most undercounted kids nationwide. The net undercount of Latinx kids was 7.5 percent, while the undercount of Black kids was 6.3 percent, according to an analysis of 2010 census data. Chicago ranks second in the nation for the number of Black residents and children under five who live in hard-to-count tracts, and third in the nation for Latinx residents, according to a 2019 report by the Chicago Urban League. Centers has been providing early education and other family-oriented support since 1971. It has centers in Bronzeville and south suburban Riverdale, as well as a newer center in Austin. All of these neighborhoods have been classified as “very high risk” for undercounting children by the CUNY census mapping tool. Like many other social service agencies, Centers stands to lose funding if the undercount of young children in Illinois continues or increases from 2010. But it’s also well poised to reach parents in hardto-count areas across the South and West Sides. Centers hadn’t planned to use social media for census outreach. They started out by selecting and training ten parents from childcare centers around the city to serve as “parent ambassadors” within their own communities. “We picked larger agencies so we could have a larger impact, on the South Side, West Side, and East Side—a little bit on the North Side, but we found that it was a little oversaturated with census programs,” Garner said. The idea was that Centers would train
these parents to conduct outreach, so they could “reach back into childhood programs [where their kids are enrolled] to make sure those children were counted.” But then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the shelter-in-place order made in-person outreach for parent ambassadors difficult and unsafe, so Centers shifted its outreach online. “We recognize that parents, and especially young parents, will be on social media for hours,” Garner said. So Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok were natural places to continue their outreach. So far, the Level Up challenge, which got parents and kids dancing and posting to their Instagram stories about the census, has been one of their biggest sources of engagement, though they’ve also had success with “tagging challenges,” where people can win a giftcard by tagging friends on a @ChicagoBabiesCount post. One recent tagging challenge sent a donation to a local daycare agency with the most votes. Several of the parent ambassadors, who Garner said are continuing their outreach over the phone and web, have made photo and video cameos on the Instagram page, too. Offline, Centers is also sending out census information at select food pantry locations, too. So far, Centers’ followers number in the hundreds, Garner said they snagged a like from the mayor’s Instagram page recently, and said to keep an on on the accounts because they have other engagements planned for the next few weeks. She hopes that their newly launched accounts, and their challenges, will encourage parents and children to learn about the census in a fun and engaging way. “They are our future,” Garner said. “We cannot wait ten years from now, if we really value our children.” ¬ Emeline Posner is a senior editor. She last wrote about how home-visiting services for young moms and babies are adapting to the circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis. JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23
JUSTICE
Abandoned Communities Arrange Black/Brown Truce
Chicago residents quell racial divide in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
W
hen the bridges to downtown Chicago went up, public transportation was cut off, and Chicago police were deployed to wealthy areas of the city, the message to residents in the South and West sides was clear: amid protesting, looting, and expressions of rage at the state-sanctioned killing of Black people, neighborhoods residents were on their own. 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2020
PHOTO BY MATEO ZAPATA
The social unrest in Chicago following the police murder of George Floyd originally targeted the Loop, where political and corporate power is concentrated, but was soon redirected to neighborhoods already in crisis from high rates of COVID-19 and unemployment arising from the governor’s stay-at-home order. In some areas, the pivot resulted in the creation of impromptu selfdefense groups and the visible emergence—
and sudden social acceptance—of longstanding Latino street gangs. Some gang members set out to protect storefronts, and some inadvertently exposed their racism as well. The first business that was looted in the predominantly Mexican neighborhood of Little Village was a shoe store called Fresh Kickz that is regularly patronized by young people from all over the city. Early
Facebook footage from Sunday, May 31, showed people running out of the store with boxes of sneakers in their arms, as passersby stood around watching or taking video. When word spread, Latin Kings from the next block showed up to flex, and as is usual in this neighborhood, the police were the last to arrive. Video footage showed CPD arresting some suspected looters, all of whom were Black, but no gang members
JUSTICE
were disciplined. That’s when online rumors began circulating that Latino gangs were working with CPD to attack Black residents. Mexican-American gangs in the city have historical beefs with Chicago police and will vehemently deny those claims. But it is true that CPD let them perform their vigilantism; many of us saw the street confrontations go unchecked for prolonged periods of time. The adrenaline rush that gang members normally get from behaving territorially within their gang boundaries, and any underlying anti-Black racism, had them “posted up” all along Cermak, the street that borders North Lawndale, a predominantly Black neighborhood. There were multiple reports of cars with Black passengers getting bricked, bottled, and rammed into by other vehicles whenever they passed by Little Village. In one instance, Mexican-American gangbangers pulled out Black occupants from a car on Cermak and Kedzie before they set it on fire. A social media rumor went viral claiming that a pregnant woman had been stabbed multiple times by the Latin Kings, but no incident of that nature has been reported by authorities. Online, Black people were warning one another not to go to Latino neighborhoods, and if they did, to be prepared to retaliate. That Sunday ended up being the deadliest day for Chicago in decades, with eighteen people killed across the city, the Sun-Times reported. Similar numbers hadn’t been seen since the 1990s. Sheniyha Washington posted a video of her family’s car windows getting smashed by men with wooden bats who were standing on Cermak. “My mother, sisters, and I were on our way home from a baby shower. We were not looting or protesting nor attacking people,” Washington wrote. “Some people claim they were protecting their community, but from what I saw, they were the ones setting cars on fire, attacking innocent people….” An audio recording of a police scanner exposes how useless CPD was in deescalating the street mayhem. After an alleged shooting on Cermak and Spaulding, the same intersection where Washington’s family was targeted, 10th district police received a call over the scanner that said, "There's gangbangers versus gangbangers. They're shooting across at each other," to which one officer responded, “Let ‘em do it!” and another officer replied, “Let it be!” Much of the feuding took place online and off the radar of mainstream media, which was unable to grasp the nuances of
the conflict. One post that went viral and set people off in both communities was a “Mexicans vs. Blacks” flyer that invited everyone to meet up at 3:45pm fully armed. “Don’t come if you’re not putting your life on the line,” the anonymous flyer read. The conflict on Cermak spread to suburban Cicero after looting took place at Hawthorne Works Shopping Center on the corner of Cermak and Cicero Ave. and nearby Patron Liquor, which was livestreamed by WGN-TV. Footage on YouTube and Facebook show clashes between what appear to be Black and Mexican people, including an attack on an elderly Mexican man and the destruction of an SUV driven by Black people. Suburban resident Luz Chavez recorded complaints from bystanders who said they were targeted in Cicero simply because they were Black. Some shop owners who were neither Black nor Latino stood on the rooftop of their businesses brandishing long guns. In Pilsen, residents who have seen gentrification displace family-owned businesses in recent years closed off 18th Street to incoming traffic with garbage cans from the alley, but denied being affiliated or working with gangbangers. A masked man said on video, "Looting [small] businesses, that's not justice. So carry on with the fucking protests, protest hard, our heart is with you guys. But stop fucking over the little guy. Because Target, Walmart, Costco, they're gonna make it. But guess what? Uncle José and my tio Juan, they're not gonna make it if you destroy their business. Stand fucking strong, stand together, and nobody will fuck us over." But the flames were fanned on Monday when two Mexican men in Cicero, José Gutiérrez and Victor Cazarez, were shot to death “by outside agitators,” according to the Town of Cicero, who later posted the mugshot of a Black suspect on Facebook. Governor Pritzker declared a state of emergency and Illinois State Police were deployed to Cicero that night, while 10th district CPD had Little Village and North Lawndale on lockdown.
T
hough many aldermen vocally condemned the looting and violent prejudice in their wards, the real intervention didn’t seem to come from the city, but from the neighborhoods themselves. Community activists, violence interrupters, clergy, local leadership, and even gangaffiliated people started speaking out against racism on social media and going outdoors
to de-escalate violent outbursts. Mentors from the violence prevention program that operates out of New Life Church were outside most of the week, wearing neon vests, feeding the youth, and maintaining some line of communication with CPD. They also organized a unity BBQ at La Villita Park with Black mentors in their network. On Tuesday morning, Robert R. Fort, the son of Jeff Fort, founder of the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation—kin of the Latin Kings—posted on Facebook: “So I just talked to one of the heads for the Latin Kings, one of the generals, they're standing down and they're fucking up their young guys who started all the bullshit,” he wrote. “I talked to Angel for the Latin folks, they're standing down as well,” he said in reference to the Gangster Disciples in North Lawndale and Gangster Two-Six in Little Village. “And thanks for the ladies who facilitated these phone calls. People sent them off telling them we were coming to loot and destroy their neighborhoods but still be careful because they got little assholes like we do running around doing stupid shit. “So we coming together to stop the violence between our two communities. I can't lie, I was ready for war but violence is not the way. If any of the heads want to talk to them I have the numbers. Still be careful though. Somebody's trying to push for a race war, it's not happening today!” Chicago gangs have always organized themselves along race, which is unsurprising as city neighborhoods are racially segregated. However, they arrange cross-racial alliances and agreements, like the one that Fort brokered, that allow them to coexist. By Tuesday night the streets were calm. On Wednesday, Mayor Lightfoot visited both neighborhoods, saying the clashes might have been internal gang conflict, though she was considering the possibility of external influences. “These are young men who really have not reached maturity, and adding into that mix of youth and testosterone and weapons and maybe other things is a recipe for disaster,” she said.
the type for battle or discord that we need," said neighborhood resident and organizer, Jazmine Stubbs. "So I wanted to bring up a truce at a neighborhood meeting, which consisted of Pastor Phil Jackson, Pilsen Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, and representatives from Little Village and Humboldt Park, so that we can focus on what's really important and that is the movement for Back lives and issues of police brutality." The grassroots group ChiResists planned the first cross-neighborhood unity march. El Foro del Pueblo organized a follow-up Brown People for Black Power march in Little Village, and on Tuesday night posted, “After days of tensions and anti-black racism fueled by the Chicago Police Department, gangs from Little Village and the West Side are negotiating an understanding.” “Latinx and Black street organizations from the west side of the Little Village neighborhood and from North Lawndale have come together in a day understanding to commit to continue working on Black and Brown unity,” the post continued. “We have confirmation similar conversations are happening in Humboldt Park, Cicero and the west side of Chicago in an effort to stop the tensions that are being fueled by the police.” A dozen more Black Lives Matter marches from Belmont-Cragin to South Chicago, mutual aid efforts, mural projects, art campaigns, banner drops, and signs of solidarity have been organized since, as Black and brown neighborhoods lick their wounds and attempt to rebuild their communities. On Thursday, North Lawndale and Little Village residents are planning a Truce Peace March that will culminate in Douglass Park. But the burden of finding resolution rests on Latinx people who must address their internalized racism—and ultimately, on the elected officials of a white supremacist system that, through reckless and racist policy, pits Black and brown communities against each other, cages them, and kills them. ¬
ommunity groups organized conversations about race in North Lawndale. "I felt the call to action because I thought about my dad's and my brothers' safety and I grew up knowing when there was a Black and brown gang war going on, we simply could not go to the other side of the train tracks... With everything that's going on right now I just feel like this is not
Cordell Longstreath contributed to this story.
C
Jacqueline Serrato is the editor-in-chief of the South Side Weekly. She last wrote about the aldermanic response to COVID-19 in the South Side.
JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25
LITERATURE
Tracing the Roots of Torture
A collection of open letters details how Chicago’s history of police torture stems from residents failing to hold our city and justice system accountable, while others fight for change BY MICHELLE GAN This article was originally published on our website on May 20.
I
n The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, Laurence Ralph pens twenty-one open letters to a variety of recipients—dead, alive, and anonymous. These letters, including some addressed to Chicago’s youth of color, former Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer Doris Byrd, and the late civil rights activist William Patterson, serve as the culmination of fourteen years of Ralph’s research as an anthropologist and the time he spent grappling with the prevalence of police torture in Chicago. Published earlier this year by the University of Chicago Press, this book is about how torture stems from our failure as residents to hold our city and our justice system accountable, and how some people are fighting to change that. Ralph, the director and co-founder of Princeton University’s Center on Transnational Policing, begins his book by explaining that approximately 125 African-American suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers at the Area 2 police district station in Pullman between 1972 and 1991. Members of the CPD beat, raped, electrocuted, suffocated, and burned Chicago residents by leaving them tied up to a radiator for hours. As a police commander in Area 2, Jon Burge oversaw the torture of at least 125 people, including a boy as young as thirteen. Burge was never tried for his involvement in torture, and was never found guilty of anything more than perjury and obstruction. Until his death in 2018, he continued to receive his pension despite being fired from the CPD. Yet according to Ralph, “the problem of police torture does not begin and end with a dangerous man named Jon Burge.” Instead, throughout his book, Ralph uses the metaphor of a torture tree to explain how foundational torture and police violence are to Chicago’s identity. According to Ralph, the torture tree’s roots represent our “financial, political, and 26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2020
psychological investment in fear,” embodied by increased funding of policing and prisons in an attempt to create a sense of safety. It looks like Chicago allocating forty percent, or $1.46 billion, of its budget to policing, making it the second-highest share of an American city budget that goes to policing. It looks like Chicago paying out $662 million in police misconduct settlements from 2004 to 2016. It looks like Chicago spending $4 million a day on the police despite an $838 million budget deficit. It looks like former Mayor Rahm Emanuel announcing plans to spend $95 million to build a police academy in the same neighborhood where he closed six public schools in 2013. It looks like Mayor Lori Lightfoot continuing those plans despite a youth-led #NoCopAcademy campaign demanding those funds be redirected to mental health centers, schools, and job training programs. Ralph describes the torture tree’s trunk as the use-of-force continuum, the branches as police officers, and the leaves as all incidents of police violence. The use-of-force continuum refers to the city’s guidelines for how much force officers are allowed to use against criminal suspects. Theoretically, police officers should start at the bottom of the continuum and only escalate force as needed. However, Ralph argues that the “militarization of the police”—the increased use of military equipment such as submachine guns and assault rifles in police departments throughout America—has also resulted in a military mindset wherein police occupy the role of soldiers and approach residents as if they are enemy combatants. The trunk then becomes the pretext police officers use to justify mistreatment of Chicago residents under the guise of appropriate use of force. Not all police officers are branches on this torture tree, but they all do become vulnerable “to losing their humanity—and to becoming hollowed out, wooden, and one with this tree,” Ralph says. He shares the story of a retired cop who talks about
the ways his career changed him, leading him to treat strangers, especially Black people, as threats with ulterior motives. As hollow branches, these officers are unable to separate themselves from a larger system that punishes marginalized communities, especially Black and Brown Chicagoans. The story of Dominique “Damo” Franklin is just one of an infinite amount of leaves on Ralph’s torture tree. In 2014, police officers used a Taser on Franklin three times after they had handcuffed him for stealing a bottle of liquor. After the third time, he hit his head on a pole and fell into a coma from which he never awoke. Franklin was only twenty-three years old. Franklin’s life and untimely death inspired activists to create a group called We Charge Genocide to protest police violence. Their name referenced the petition “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People,” which the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations in 1951. This petition “accused the United States government of subjecting African Americans to premature death in a calculated manner” akin to genocide, citing the over 150 racial killings of Black people, largely at the hands of law enforcement. We Charge Genocide’s work would ultimately result in eight young Chicago activists traveling to Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 to present a report to the United Nations highlighting how Franklin’s death exists as part of a larger systemic murder of Black people in America, where African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Ralph juxtaposes Franklin with Andrew Wilson. Wilson was the first of Burge’s victims to accuse him of torture, and the catalyst in exposing police torture in Chicago. Ralph notes that the city’s public apology to Wilson and the other torture survivors sends a clear message: “what Burge did to Andrew Wilson is now considered unacceptable—unlike what the Chicago
police did to [Franklin].” Ralph’s observation brings us to one of his main points: no human being should be subject to torture, regardless of their guilt. In Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, another book grappling with the brokenness of our criminal justice system, he makes a similar case for compassion: “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Yet, throughout Ralph’s research, he encounters many Chicagoans who defend torture, including a forty-four-year-old Black man named Todd who Ralph interviewed for his research. Despite past mistreatment by the police, Todd believed bad guys deserved to be tortured. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, one of Ralph’s letter recipients, whom he interviews for his research, captures this mentality: “in the US, guilty means you are a bad person.” This attitude serves as the bedrock for our broken criminal justice system—only by dehumanizing those who are guilty of crimes, even those not yet proven, can we justify mass incarceration and the deplorable conditions of jails and prisons. The toll of the current COVID-19 pandemic on jails and prisons, where it is impossible for detainees to practice social distancing and protect themselves from the virus, serves as proof of that. Look no further than our own Cook County Jail, where 535 detainees have tested positive for the virus since the outbreak began and seven have died of COVID-19, as of press time. Slahi was detained at Guantánamo Bay for fourteen years, experiencing torture that included physical and sexual abuse. After being tortured by Richard Zuley, a former CPD detective, Slahi confessed to crimes of which he had no knowledge. Because the confession had clearly resulted from torture, even the prosecutor at Guantánamo opted not to file charges against Slahi. Although Slahi was eventually released to his home country of Mauritania after years of fighting, Mauritania continues to deny him his papers and ID card under orders from the American government.
LITERATURE
COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
The gross miscarriages of justice taking place from Chicago to Cuba beg the question: what can we do to uproot the torture tree? For Ralph, “the purpose of writing open letters...is so that none of us can claim ignorance.” Throughout the book, he emphasizes how torture in Chicago was an “open secret.” Everyone knew about it: police officers, judges, prosecutors, and politicians. While suspects screamed in interrogation rooms, officers sat outside at their desks and continued their work.
Whistleblowers’ unsuccessful attempts to call out torture incidents demonstrate to what extent torture was an open secret within CPD. When William Parker, who joined CPD in 1957 as a Black man on a police force that was less than one percent Black, interrupted the brutalization of a suspect, he was reprimanded by a unit commander and told not to get “involved with other officers and their prisoners.” Parker’s attempts at whistleblowing eventually resulted in a demotion from detective to patrolman.
The open secret extended deeper into government, beyond CPD, to include the state’s attorney and mayor’s offices. In 1982, the state’s attorney and thenMayor Jane Byrne’s offices saw Wilson with torture injuries so severe that a doctor who saw him Wilson wrote a letter to then-CPD Superintendent Richard J. Brzeczek. Although the doctor called for an investigation into the brutality, thenState’s Attorney Richard M. Daley declined to investigate the evidence of torture. Daley would later go on to serve as mayor of Chicago from 1989 to 2011. In addressing future mayors of Chicago, Ralph calls attention to the fact that police violence and torture in Chicago did not simply result from a group of “bad apples”— select rogue cops who hated Black people and considered themselves above the law. For Ralph, focusing on “bad apples” like Burge and Zuley is a way for the mayor to “focus our attention on individuals rather than conditions that allow torturers to excel in the profession of law enforcement.” He argues that doing so absolves our elected officials of responsibility for their complicity in creating a culture where Burge felt so invincible that he regularly bragged about his violent interrogation methods in local taverns. Even as Ralph beseeches future mayors to improve CPD oversight, he also falls short in holding parties accountable for their systemic role in creating the conditions that allow torture to thrive. In the prologue, Ralph asserts his intention to use the metaphor of the torture tree to demonstrate the book’s central theme: “torture persists in Chicago because of the complicity of people in power, and it persists in the United States because of our history of violence against populations we perceive as threatening to us.” Yet Ralph’s torture tree fails to address the complicit powerful. While the roots hold society accountable for misdirecting fear into funding policing over schools, every other part of his tree traces back to individual police officers. The torture tree does not account for the prosecutors who benefited by using torture-induced confessions to close cases or the politicians who benefit by stoking fears about safety to gain votes. In fact, Ralph only references the Fraternal Order of the Police (FOP) once in passing, despite the enormous influence the police union wields in any conversation
on police accountability. Most recently, the FOP has argued that the City of Chicago must destroy police misconduct records older than five to seven years, potentially resulting in the destruction of evidence for civil rights and wrongful conviction cases. While Chicago has made several efforts at addressing allegations of torture, Ralph notes that the torture tree has not been uprooted. In 2009, Illinois created the first Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission in the United States, but the commission only has the resources to investigate sixteen cases per year despite receiving three to five new torture claims a week. The Chicago City Council passed the 2015 Reparations Ordinance awarding $5.5 million in reparations to fifty-seven survivors of police torture, but five years later, the city has still not allocated funding for the public torture memorial they promised. No police officer has ever been indicted for torture. Chicago “has created a world in which the tortured exists but torturers do not,” Ralph writes. The complicit powerful like Daley and Brzeczek face no consequences for their role in covering up torture. Former prosecutors William Kunkle and Richard Devine, who consulted with Daley when he declined to investigate Wilson’s torture allegations, went on to become a Cook County judge and state’s attorney, respectively. While Ralph’s knowledge of police torture is unassailable, his decision to share his research through a series of letters is an interesting one. In explaining his epistolary approach, Ralph states that letters “are windows into the worldview of the subjects of the study.” He explains that cultural anthropologists like himself “center the point of view of the people they study, as opposed to merely bringing their own theories and philosophies to bear on the social problem at hand.” Yet, while Ralph succeeds in telling the story of torture in Chicago, his approach fails to fully center his research subjects. By positioning himself as the author of these letters, he is inserting himself into the narrative and presenting us more of his worldview—his theories and philosophies—than that of his subjects. Ralph even writes, “Every letter contains a felt sense of who the author is and what the author wants.” While Ralph did speak to over a hundred Chicago residents about their understandings of police torture, he ultimately controlled what was included in this book. JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27
"The gross miscarriages of justice taking place from Chicago to Cuba beg the question: what can we do to uproot the torture tree?"
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Ralph’s work is strongest when he leverages the voices of those he calls his interlocutors, like Page May, an activist with We Charge Genocide. Many of the book’s best sentences come from May, including the following excerpt from a letter she wrote to Franklin: “often it’s implied that our deaths as Black people mean a lot more than our lives and our living them. But we do this for your life, Damo, and your right to live it. We do this for the living.” May reminds us who is at the heart of this book: torture survivors and activists fighting for police accountability and investing resources in counseling and education instead of a police academy. May reminds us that this work is rooted in love— for those that have died and suffered from police violence and for those who will come after and inherit this city. To uproot the torture tree means to confront our fears, such as the fear that without police we will not be safe, Ralph argues. It also requires us to reckon with what Ralph calls fear of “the Other,” which is predicated on our own racist assumptions that associate Black and Brown bodies with criminality. Chicago’s struggles with police violence and torture reflect the city’s legacy of neglect and discrimination against Black and Brown communities. Once we understand our own culpability in allowing the torture tree to thrive and reframe our understandings of what it will take to keep us safe, we can join activists like May in holding our city accountable for its legacies of police violence and torture. To quote May, “there is nothing natural or easy or instinctive about believing in a better world. About fighting for peace. About reimagining justice, rebuilding community, or transforming relationships. That is the struggle.” ¬ Laurence Ralph, The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. $19. The University of Chicago Press. 248 pages
28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2020
Watch Laurence Ralph discuss his work with Danielle Allen, director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, in April at sswk.ly/TortureLettersTalk Michelle Gan is a contributor to the Weekly. She last wrote about the future of food policy in Chicago and has also published a photo essay about Jackson Park’s Wooded Island.
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ART
Keeping Art Alive During a Pandemic South Side artists find creative ways to secure funding and do their work despite COVID-19 restrictions
“[Art] has this ability to create a visual mythology [of] power for those that feel powerless in this moment.”
BY WALTER LI AND YIWEN LU
W
hen Chicago DJ Sadie Woods lost the opportunity to perform for a live audience—or a live audience in the same physical space, at least—she had to ask herself a lot of questions. She doesn’t have all the answers— but the business side isn’t her primary focus right now. “Actually thinking about the well-being of people, their mental, emotional, physical health, I think is more a priority now and including that for myself. So it's been a time [to] pause and reset and recalibrate,” Woods said. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a unique set of challenges for workers in a field that holds human interaction at its core. Social distancing practices have forced artists across Chicago—many of whom are freelance workers—to rethink how they produce, monetize, and engage with their audiences. And then, of course, there’s the emotional toll of living in a country in crisis. “I think being in a pandemic amplifies all those things that have already existed before…with the police brutality cases across the states [and] the killings that have happened, everything is amplified right now,” Woods said. The Arts for Illinois Relief Fund—a partnership between the City of Chicago, the State of Illinois, Arts Alliance Illinois, and numerous other philanthropic groups— has structured relief for artists struggling during the pandemic. Individuals like Sadie Woods and art education facilities like Global Girls and Little Black Pearl alike have received grants from the fund. But funding has just been one component of the larger reassessment taking place: artists falling back upon their 30 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2020
networks—albeit at a distance—and finding ways to give back.
When the pandemic hit, many artists’ first thought was how they could use their platform to support others. For the People Artists Collective, a group of Black artists and artists of color that incorporates their work into grassroots organizing, diverted grant funds from the Field Foundation into relief funds for marginalized artists in Illinois. The need was overwhelming; within four hours of opening the grant application, over sixty artists applied, leading the collective to close the application out of lack of funds. With additional funding secured, they opened a second round, and received 100 applicants within the first couple of hours. For The People have continued their arts activism with greater urgency during
the pandemic. They’ve partnered with the Chicago Community Bond Fund on the “Decarcerate Now: Virtual Quilt,” honoring people who have died of COVID-19 while in Cook County jails, and joined forces with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization to create posters protesting the demolition of the Crawford Power Generating Station smokestack during the pandemic. In an interview, For The People cofounder Monica Trinidad reflected on the importance of engaging their work with the Black Lives Matter movement. Trinidad urges those who may not be able to physically protest—be they immunocompromised, traumatized, or undocoumented—to help create posters or graphics. Trinidad herself has created a graphics portfolio, #BrownArtistsForBlackPower, as a response to anti-Black attacks in Little Village. “[Art] has this ability to create a visual mythology [of ] power for those that feel
powerless in this moment,” Trinidad said. Other artists have taken it upon themselves to help their communities through platforms they’ve built over the years. Chicago-based Sicangu Lakota hiphop artist and musician Frank Waln usually brings in revenue with concerts and other appearances, since streaming royalties don’t amount to much. Now, during a global pandemic, Waln has used services like Instagram Live to perform concerts at a distance, and has attended digital meetings and webinars to connect with organizations like the Dream Warriors, an Indigenous art collective he’s affiliated with. “Now, I can just go into my home studio and […] turn on my spotlight and put up a nice blanket and do an hour-long show,” Waln said. Waln has also been able to work on two albums—one dedicated to his mother, another focused on Native flute—set to release in the next couple of months. But all
K. RODRIGUEZ
FRANK WALN
CORI LIN
Art and the Community, At a Distance
ART
Funding Amidst Economic Crisis
MONICA TRINIDAD
the while, he’s had to rely on his audiences to raise money for Indigenous communities across the country. Some art organizations have insisted that the show go on. Free Street Theater got its start—fittingly enough—in the aftermath of the 1968 riots. Wasted, their newest production, was originally slated to open May 1. That hasn’t happened, but they’ve continued to prepare via Zoom rehearsals and socially distant equipment transfers. Karla Estela Rivera, the group’s executive director, hopes to present the production online in June. “[W]hat I love about us is that we're really thinking about the things that we can do, and thinking about how we can, you know, we don't necessarily have to be together to build community,” Rivera said. Nowhere is the drive for community support through art stronger than in art education organizations. Little Black Pearl, a Kenwood/Oakland-based arts education center with an adjacent high school, has switched to online learning. Monica Haslip, LBP’s Executive Director, hasn’t just been busy organizing coursework and figuring
out how to make technology accessible to her students—she’s also been focused on material concerns, like making sure LBP’s on-campus café is still serving food to the community. SkyArt, Chicago’s only free visual arts education center for youth, has given away over 1,000 free art kits to participants and kids in shelters. Some art educators worry about how the arts translate to a digital platform. “To keep our youth and our actors engaged, we tried to have Zoom rehearsals,” said Marvinetta Woodley-Penn, the executive director of Global Girls, a youth performing arts education center in South Shore. “[It] does not work, especially for ensemble work, if you're all trying to talk at the same time or sing at the same time.” Despite her faith in the resilience of her students, Woodley-Penn worries they are not being challenged enough, and spending too much time on their screens. “I'm very afraid, and [I don't] think we're giving enough attention to that,” Woodley-Penn said in regard to the loss of routine during the pandemic.
Across art organizations and individual artists, funding has been of great concern. With many artists being freelancers, and an overall feeling that the arts are undervalued in society, there is a fear that the arts are being overlooked in financial relief programs. The inability to perform and showcase art because of the need to practice social distancing has led to a decrease in revenue for art organizations and individuals. “I think that people underestimate the scale of the industry,” said Monica Haslip of Little Black Pearl. “The need is great.” Arts for Illinois Relief Fund, the prominent emergency funding source during the pandemic, has relied on their grantmaking partners 3Arts and the Arts Work Fund to help manage grant applications from individual artists and art organizations. As of May 18, the fund has raised $6.5 million dollars, and 906 artists and 166 art organizations were awarded funding in the first round. Other organizations like Free Street Theater have applied to numerous other funding sources, receiving a PPP loan through the CARES Act. But even grant recipients have doubts about the accessibility of funding. Many grant applications require proof of loss of income, which is hard to furnish when you are self-employed. Trinidad noted that many applications also operate on the lottery system, meaning that artists who need funding may not get it. “I really see it's important to…prioritize queer, trans, gender non-conforming people of color, communities of color, disabled people, undocumented people who are not getting stimulus checks,” among others, Trinidad said. And of course, funding is limited: the Arts for Illinois Relief Fund can only give $1,500 grants to individuals and $8,000-$30,000 grants to organizations. The shortcomings of the grant model have made many in the art world reconsider how they can cultivate an environment more supportive of the arts and freelance workers. Many artists hope that with the challenges leveled at the art industry during the pandemic, more people will understand the value of the arts. In an interview, Arts Alliance Illinois (a member of the coalition supporting the Arts for Illinois Relief Fund) Executive Director Claire Rice emphasized the fund is for emergency support. “[W]e are
working on medium- to longer-term policy interventions and systems change that will bring broader relief to our sector,” Rice said. “To really have a strong fabric that can support artists and see the value of artists, [the city needs to] give stipends and allow them to make more money,” said Eric Williams, founder of Hyde Park boutique The Silver Room. For the first time since 2002, Silver Room’s blockbuster Block Party has been cancelled. And while the store is shuttered, employees—many of them artists, including a writer, DJ, and photographer—have no income or meeting space. “We had a GoFundMe for them, [and] that helped a little bit, but you know, just don't have physical spaces, it definitely hurts,” Williams said. “Now it's gonna be even harder for a lot of artists to make it, when it's not considered ‘essential.’ You know, I would argue that art is essential. I wish people saw it more as essential. It's not always compensated that way,” Williams said. Supporting Artists and Opportunities for Change Though they’re still waiting on larger changes, artists have pointed to the many ways the public can continue to support and engage with the arts. Many artists underscored the importance of directly supporting individual artists or art organizations that have made a difference in your life with cash-transfer apps like Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo. Other ways to support artists include donating to larger funds like the Arts for Illinois Relief Fund, as well as local mutual aid efforts. Artists also emphasize the importance of engaging with the arts, sharing the work of artists, and participating in digital concerts and events. With the pandemic, Frank Waln has also been reminded of the importance of fans. “I just, you know, want people to know and remember that y'all give us hope and you make a difference in the artists you support's lives, especially in times like now,” Waln said. ¬ Walter Li is a student at the University of Chicago majoring in anthropology. He is a first-time contributor to the Weekly. Yiwen Lu is a politics reporter for the Weekly. She last wrote on COVID-19 and "essential workers" on the South Side. JUNE 10, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 31
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